Building IT capabilities that survive technology churn
Last week, MegaVendor Corp absorbed that best-of-breed solution you spent months selecting. The acquisition email is waxing poetic about an “exciting roadmap ahead” and “enhanced synergies.” Sounds great, but if you’ve been in IT for a while, you know how this is really going to go.
Eighteen months from now, you’ll get the sunset announcement. The “migration path” will require rebuilding everything from scratch, and those strategic initiatives that were supposed to transform how your organization operates will grind to a halt.
If that wasn’t frustrating enough, chances are you’ll go through the whole shuffle again in three to five years. Many IT departments have effectively become permanent migration teams, rebuilding the same capabilities over and over with different logos instead of advancing the business the way they’d hoped.
Fortunately, there’s a way to get ahead of this problem. If you take a step back and consider this issue from a standpoint of capabilities as opposed to tools, you’ll no longer be at the mercy of technology churn quite as much.
The cost of platform dependency
Vendor lock-in runs deeper than contracts and licensing fees. When you build your processes around a specific platform’s way of doing things, you’re not just buying software or a license to access it. You’re also buying into an entire collection of features and processes that can evaporate with a single acquisition email.
Think about all those carefully documented workflows you and your team designed around specific interfaces (or inherited from people who did). The moment the UI changes, they’re worthless.
If your documentation’s anything like most IT teams’, it’s full of annotated screenshots that become archaeological artifacts after every major update. If you’ve painstakingly built business logic into proprietary configurations, you’re going to have an awful time extracting it when migration time comes. All that specialized knowledge your team has accumulated will disappear the moment you switch platforms.
At a high level, platform-specific investment compounds into an even bigger problem. Your three-year digital transformation roadmap is slowly turning into a five-year platform migration marathon. Meanwhile, your competitors who figured out how to minimize platform dependency are making their businesses more resilient while you’re still stuck moving data.
What survives when vendors don’t
Vendors come and go, but your business needs will stay remarkably consistent. You’ll always need visibility into what’s happening across your environment, whether that intelligence comes from SolarWinds, Datadog, or a PowerShell script someone wrote five years ago. The specific tool might change every few years, but you’ll still need to understand system health and dependencies no matter what.
You’ll also always need automation to reduce manual work and human error. Maybe you’re using Ansible today and possibly looking at PowerAutomate tomorrow, but the fundamental requirement to reliably execute repeatable processes (especially at 2 AM, when you probably want to be sleeping) will never go away.
Strong security will be essential for the foreseeable future, too. It keeps your data protected and your auditors happy. Sure, your scanners and SIEM platforms will evolve faster than you can budget for them, but compliance requirements outlive any vendor’s particular approach to meeting them. Auditors don’t care which tool generated your compliance report as long as your controls work.
When you structure IT around these enduring capabilities rather than around whatever platform you’re currently using, something interesting happens. Vendor changes transform from existential crises into manageable transitions. Your team builds expertise that carries over between platforms, and your documentation stays relevant because it explains what you’re trying to achieve, not just which buttons to click in a specific interface. Deciding when to fire your technology becomes a lot easier, too.
Identifying what actually matters
It’s so easy to focus on IT outcomes in situations like this, but business outcomes tell you what matters most at the end of the day. There’s a world of difference between “the ticketing system must stay up” and “customers get help when they need it.” One statement just describes infrastructure, while the other clarifies what the business requires.
Here’s a useful exercise you can run for any critical system. Imagine the vendor disappears tomorrow—they literally vanish into thin air, never to be heard from again. Which capabilities would you lose? Which business processes would grind to a halt? Your answers reveal your real requirements. Everything else basically amounts to implementation details that vendors tend to complicate.
This perspective radically changes how you approach requirements gathering. Instead of writing “We need ServiceNow for ticket management,” you’d document something more like “We need to track, prioritize, and resolve user issues while maintaining SLA visibility.” The first goal locks you into a specific vendor’s ecosystem, while the second defines a capability that plenty of platforms can provide.
When vendors come calling with their sales pitches, this framework helps you cut through the noise. You’re evaluating whether their platform delivers your required capabilities, instead of checking features off some arbitrary list.
During these conversations with vendors, consider asking them how you’d migrate away from their platform if needed. Good vendors have already thought about this, and great ones have documentation ready to share. The ones who get flustered and start talking about “sticky features,” meanwhile, are telling you everything you need to know about their lock-in strategy.
Putting this approach into practice
Next, you’ll want to look at how your teams are organized. That “ServiceNow admin” on your team is better understood as someone who optimizes service delivery. The platform in question just happens to be their current tool. When people understand they’re capability owners rather than tool operators, they naturally develop skills that outlast any particular vendor relationship.
Documentation needs a rethink, too. The most valuable documentation explains why decisions get made, not just the sequence of clicks to implement them. Business logic should live in a format that exists independently of vendor configurations. When you capture the reasoning behind workflows before documenting the current implementation, the next platform migration becomes far less painful. Someone who’s never touched your old system should be able to read your docs and understand not just what needs rebuilding, but why it works that way in the first place.
For example, consider documenting your integration points instead of relying on boilerplate vendor documentation. When you know exactly which systems connect to each other and what data they exchange, you can evaluate whether a new platform supports those same connections. It might sound basic, but having a simple diagram of ‘System A sends user data to System B for provisioning’ will save months of discovery work when MegaVendor Corp inevitably announces their next acquisition.
If you’re not sure where to start, pick one critical capability (incident management and user provisioning are good candidates) and map it completely from end to end. Document every system it touches, every process that depends on it, and every outcome it enables. Make sure your documentation would still make sense if someone redacted all the vendor names. Once you’ve thoroughly mapped one capability, you’ll have a template for tackling the rest of your portfolio.
Your plan for escaping from vendor chaos
When that next “exciting news about our future” email lands, you’ll be ready for it. While other IT teams are scrambling to figure out their migration timelines and budget impacts, you’ll be calmly assessing whether the new platform supports your documented capabilities. If it doesn’t, you already know exactly what to look for in a replacement.
Your competitive advantage doesn’t come from having the latest platform or the slickest dashboard. It comes from building what lasts while other IT teams waste cycles rebuilding what doesn’t. Focus on your IT capabilities, and let the vendors worry about the underlying technologies.
