Today, we’re joined by Matilda Bailey, a networking specialist whose expertise in the architecture of connectivity offers a unique perspective on the growing challenges within enterprise software. As organizations weave their systems—from ERP to CX—into a more integrated fabric, the old models of ownership are beginning to fray. We’ll explore how this shift creates operational gaps, blurs the lines of authority between platforms and workflows, and introduces critical friction into decision-making, especially when things go wrong.
When an operational incident spans multiple integrated systems, like ERP and CX, it’s often unclear who owns the final outcome. It’s not just a technical problem, but an ownership crisis. From your perspective, how can organizations untangle this web of responsibility in real-time to manage these cross-system breakdowns effectively?
That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? The moment a problem crosses system boundaries, the old playbook gets thrown out the window. What was once a localized issue for the ERP team is now a fire drill involving three other departments. The most effective approach I’ve seen starts with acknowledging that responsibility is now distributed. You can no longer point to a single platform owner. Instead, you need a pre-defined incident response framework that focuses on the outcome, not the tool. This means when unexpected system behavior occurs, the first step isn’t to ask “Whose system is this?” but “Who owns the end-to-end business process?” The ownership gap becomes painfully visible in these moments—during data handoffs, troubleshooting, or workflow breakdowns—and if you haven’t assigned process-level accountability beforehand, you’re just watching the clock tick while teams argue over jurisdiction.
As workflows increasingly cut across platforms—say, from an HR system into a communications tool—the lines of ownership can become incredibly blurred. How can leaders clearly define authority where platform and workflow responsibilities overlap, and what does a strong governance strategy look like for managing that complexity?
This is where the collision happens—where the person responsible for the HR platform meets the person responsible for the automated onboarding workflow that touches five different systems. Authority becomes a tangled mess. A robust governance strategy anticipates this collision. It requires leaders to map out every cross-platform workflow and explicitly assign ownership for the entire flow, separate from the individual platform owners. This “workflow owner” becomes the designated authority for that process. Their role is to coordinate with platform owners, assess risk, and, most importantly, serve as the primary escalation point. Without this clarity, you get a stalemate. The HR team says their system is fine, the communications team says their platform is working, and meanwhile, the new hire hasn’t received their credentials because the automated handoff failed in the invisible space between the two.
With responsibility spread so thin across different teams, it’s easy to imagine how decision-making slows to a crawl during a crisis. What specific changes can be made to an escalation framework to reduce this friction and ensure a swift, coordinated response?
The key is to remove ambiguity before the crisis hits. A traditional, hierarchical escalation path simply doesn’t work when problems are distributed. Instead, an effective framework needs to pre-authorize a cross-functional incident response team with the authority to make decisions that span multiple domains. Think of it like a special forces unit for operational failures. One organization I worked with saw their average resolution time for cross-system failures drop by nearly half after implementing this. Before, an issue would bounce between platform owners for days. Afterward, a designated leader could immediately approve a change that touched both the ERP and CX systems, containing the impact before it cascaded. The friction isn’t just about speed; it’s about empowerment. When people know who has the authority to make the call, they stop hesitating and start coordinating.
This fragmentation of responsibility seems to have consequences beyond just incident response. How does this distributed model affect day-to-day coordination and the ability of teams to align on strategic priorities?
Absolutely, the impact is felt long before any alarms go off. When responsibility is distributed, so are priorities. The ERP team is focused on their upgrade cycle, the CX team is focused on their new feature rollout, and the automation team is trying to connect the two. In a healthy, agile environment, this distribution fosters specialization. But it becomes dysfunctional when teams can no longer agree on a shared roadmap for integrated projects. The key indicators are subtle at first: project timelines for integrated features start slipping, teams blame each other for data inconsistencies, and you hear a lot of “that’s not my system” in meetings. It’s a slow drift from agile collaboration to siloed dysfunction, where coordinating everyday workflows becomes a constant, draining negotiation.
What is your forecast for enterprise software ownership?
My forecast is that the concept of a single, monolithic “system owner” will become obsolete. The future of ownership is not about platforms; it’s about processes and outcomes. Organizations will be forced to appoint leaders who are responsible for end-to-end business workflows, regardless of the underlying technology. These roles will be hybrids—part technologist, part business strategist, part diplomat—tasked with governing the complex web of integrations, automations, and AIs that connect the enterprise. The companies that thrive will be those that stop thinking about their software as a collection of siloed applications and start managing it as a single, interconnected organism. The pain of today’s ownership gaps is the catalyst that will force this evolution.
