The €250K migration wasn’t a technology project. It was an expensive way to avoid hard conversations.
Technology purchases are often an expensive detour around the conversations nobody wants to have.
I learned this the expensive way. Six months and €250K later, we had a shiny new lakehouse - and the exact same problems. Pipelines still broke constantly. Nobody trusted the data. Analytics requests still took two weeks.
The CTO was convinced the new platform would solve everything. I didn’t push back hard enough.
What we eventually discovered: the root cause was never technology. It was ownership. No one owned data quality. No one owned the pipeline schedules. No one owned the definitions.
The migration didn’t fix anything because the problems weren’t primarily technical. They were organizational.
After the migration, we finally did the work we should have done first: assigned domain ownership and implemented data contracts. Within three months, breaking changes dropped 60%. Trust started returning.
The €250K wasn’t wasted - but it wasn’t necessary either. We could have fixed the ownership problem on the old platform for a fraction of the cost.
The lesson: new tools don’t create new habits per se. A culture that avoids hard conversations about data quality won’t suddenly have them because the platform is shinier.
Facilitate those hard discussions first. The platform can follow.
What organizational problem have you tried to solve with a technology purchase?