Hello and welcome to the ThoughtWorks Technology podcast.

I'm one of your regular host, Neil Ford, and I'm joined today with one of the common co-hosts

that I do podcast with, Rebecca Parsons.

Hello, everybody.

This is Rebecca Parsons, and happy to be here talking with our guest, Brandon Byers, and I'll turn it back, Neil, back over to you to introduce our guest. All right. So we are joined today by a member of the Doppler group that helps put together the technology radar. But he's also a head of technology of North America.

You may know him as the creator and open source of Monta Bank and a similar book, but today

we're talking about something completely different than the things that he may be known for,

for something that Brandon encounters a lot in his life in a consulting

world. Today we want to talk about integration and common integration approaches to wire

systems together. So let's hear your premise, Brandon, about how you can can or cannot buy integration.

Yeah, thanks, Neil and Rebecca for having me.

So what has been my experience in the recent past is I am involved in a lot of engagements

and client conversations, in particular where there's an industry that's

lagging a little bit in the digital adoption. So it might be energy or insurance. And they are

trying to catch up, but they're, like everybody, trying to leapfrog competition.

And so what happens, of course, is everybody looks for the shortcut.

And why wouldn't you?

The common shortcut that I find myself arguing against oftentimes is this idea that you can buy integration.

And I have to put that in context because I think a build versus buy decision point is a very healthy decision point for a lot of

digital capabilities. I have no expectation that organizations should build all of their suite

of digital products. In fact, I think increasingly you can buy a lot of them around revenue management,

around fraud detection, in addition to the traditional ERP style applications.

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