Mark Wallin, President and GM at Phillips Connect, drives the future of freight through AI, automation and connected trailer tech.
One of the costliest technology problems I see has nothing to do with the technology itself.
In my world, it looks like this: A maintenance team spends two years building a vehicle monitoring system across a large fleet, learning its capabilities and shaping daily operations around it. Meanwhile, operations and safety teams launch a separate initiative to add onboard cameras, with their own timeline, budget and vendor discussions. The two efforts never connect because nothing in the organization prompts that conversation. What the camera team doesn’t know is that the maintenance platform already supports the camera system they’re scoping. The software interface, connectivity infrastructure and vendor relationship are already in place. The organization has partially solved the problem and is now close to paying to solve it again.
Neither team was doing anything wrong. Each was solving a problem it owned, with the budget it had, the way any team would. The trouble is that technology buying decisions in large organizations follow the money rather than the knowledge. The people with the budget make the call, and the people who know what’s already running find out after the contract is signed.
That example isn’t unusual. According to MuleSoft’s 2025 Connectivity Report, organizations run an average of 897 applications, and only 29% are integrated with each other. A 2025 Harvard Business Review analysis found that departments adopting technology independently create fragmented gains (paywall) that fail to add up to strategic impact. I work with an organization that has millions of dollars committed to systems running at less than 2% adoption. Their instinct now is to consolidate what they already have, not add to it, which is what years of disconnected buying produces.
The pattern is common because it’s built into the structure of large organizations. Typically, operations, safety, maintenance and IT teams each have their own budgets, leadership chains and timelines, and the checks meant to catch overlap such as procurement reviews and executive sign-off usually depend on dollar amount rather than how many teams are affected. A department can make a purchase that touches four other groups as long as it stays below the threshold for broader review.
Even when a review happens, the sponsoring team typically arrives with a preferred vendor already in mind, and the review ends up confirming a direction rather than questioning whether there’s an existing solution. Teams often know another group should be involved and avoid the conversation anyway because bringing someone in means risking a slower timeline or a redirected budget. Teams stay in their own lanes, and decisions that should have been cross-functional get made in a vacuum.
Two Things To Do Before Your Next Tech Purchase
Organizations that manage this process well ask who else should be part of this conversation before they even choose a vendor. Most buying processes aren’t designed to ask that question, which is why the problem persists.
There are two things worth doing before your next significant technology purchase:
1. Start by mapping what technologies are already deployed across any department that shares responsibility for the same equipment, process or customer. In my corner of the transportation industry, that means a trailer: Operations decides what goes on it, maintenance keeps it running, and safety is responsible for everyone around it. All three may have technology connected to it that the others know nothing about. Most organizations can’t produce that map cleanly, and building it almost always turns up redundancy.
2. The second, and most important piece, is asking who’s missing from the room. The people who will run the technology every day are rarely the same people who approved the purchase. Build the cross-functional question in early, before anyone has a favorite vendor, because once a team commits to a direction, that conversation becomes much harder.
Conclusion
When organizations build this habit, technology investments stop being made in isolation and start reinforcing one another. Teams that once duplicated effort or worked around systems they didn’t know existed begin moving with more clarity and less waste. Before committing to what comes next, the most useful step to take is finding out what the organization has already tried, already invested in and already built its work around.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
