Thinking · November 2026 · Barking Cat series
Does the business know how to run what it is buying?
An investment pays back only if someone inside the business knows how to choose it, build it, run it and keep improving it. A business case prices the technology, the implementation partner and the licence. It can say nothing about the capability, and when that capability is missing, it can end up hired after the decision or left to the supplier. The early months then go on recovery rather than return, and the supplier sets the pace and the priorities.
Capability is two kinds of knowledge, and a business needs both before it commits.
Knowing how to do the new thing
The first is experience of doing what the investment requires: leading a replatform, running a pricing model, managing a marketplace, building a data team. Without it, the business finds out what the project needed after the project has started. The plan is written by the supplier, because nobody inside can write a better one, and the supplier’s plan is shaped by what the supplier sells.
Where the gap is filled by hiring after approval, the new hire inherits decisions they would not have made, on a timetable they did not set.
Knowing what the business already does
The second is knowledge of the current business: what its systems actually do, which processes depend on which piece of custom code, which reports feed which decisions. That knowledge can live in a few people’s heads, or nowhere. An investment that replaces or touches those systems has to recover it first, and the recovery is slow, unplanned and, when it lands on customers, expensive.
Neither gap shows in a platform comparison or a vendor demonstration, because both are about the business, not the product.
What the gaps cost
The cost is time at the start of the project, which a business case can leave unpriced. Every month spent stabilising what exists, rediscovering what the old system did or rewriting a plan the supplier got wrong is a month the benefit has not started. On a case that books £1.2m a year from launch, three months of recovery is £300,000 of benefit that the case counted and the business will not see, with invented numbers but a real mechanism.
I have seen both gaps in my own replatforms: one already under way when I arrived, without anyone in the business who had led one, where my first ninety days went on getting it back on track, and one where custom code for click and collect and in-store returns added weeks to the project and delayed customers’ refunds.
What to do before the decision
Ask two questions, and write the answers into the approval. Who in the business has done this before, and will they lead it? And which of our processes and customer journeys depend on systems this investment will touch, and who can explain what those systems do?
If the answer to either is the supplier, either hire the experience before the decision rather than after it, or accept that the supplier is setting the pace and say so in the business case. The cheaper middle route, where a permanent hire is too early, is to bring in someone who has done it before for the decision and the first ninety days, so that the plan is the business’s own.
How you will know
The measure is the date the benefit starts against the date the business case assumed. The guardrail is customer service on the journeys the project touches, such as refunds, collections and returns, because a project can stay on schedule by pushing its problems onto customers. Read both monthly from approval to three months after launch.
The decision
The decision for the board is whether the capability to run an investment is in the business before the money is committed. The question for Monday is the second one above, because it can be answered in a week and it is cheaper to know now.
This rests on one operator’s record of replatforms. It cannot tell you how often capability, rather than the technology, decides the outcome, and I have not found anyone who has measured it.
Related: The Barking Cat problem; Should we replatform?.
Back to Thinking