While these may be the best tools in each of their respective domains, if they don't play well together, how do you know which of these top-of-the-line products to bring to bear on any particular issue? They may be the "best" for their particular area of specialty, but are they really the best thing for the organization?

Building the best team
When the world champion New England Patriots took the field for Super Bowl XXXVI, the team elected to be introduced as a whole, rather than the traditional introduction of individual players. Their explanation for this decision was their belief that the single most important element for their organization was the team itself, and not any one individual. They went on to dominate their heavily favored opponent, the St. Louis Rams (who introduced their starting line-up one player at a time), for most of the game. Although the Rams valiantly battled back near the end, ultimately the Patriots won the game 20-17.

It has long been known in the sporting world that well-managed teams of competent but unremarkable players consistently outperform those with one or two superstars who excel on an individual basis. Superior performance of a team comes when the focus is on team performance and not individual performance.

Building an exceptional IT enterprise requires much of the same mentality. Having good tools that play well together across the enterprise produces far superior results compared to having a collection of isolated "best of breed" products that stand alone. From applications that cannot or will not share data to systems management products that only work in specialized environments, these "point solutions" only serve to isolate individual branches of an enterprise and make it more difficult to deliver quality products and services.

From an enterprise perspective, the ability to seamlessly integrate with the rest of the operation is a far more desirable attribute than any other specialized feature or function that may make the product or system attractive to those who look at things from a narrower point of view.

When the best is not the best
"We have the finest payroll system available on the market," we were told. "We also have the best Project Management system available, and we have a great Software Quality Assurance system to support our Continuous Process Improvement program." Although these unsolicited claims were presented to us with great pride, we had to wonder if this really was the best thing for the organization as we watched programmers struggle at the end of the day to sign on to three independent computing environments to enter the same exact daily time information into three independent systems using three completely different coding structures.

When we spoke to the Quality Assurance Officer, we were also told with great pride how much time he spent going over his specialized reports that compared entries from the various databases, and how he has been able to detect and correct discrepancies between the three systems. With three completely independent systems for recording a developer's time, you had three hardware environments, three software products, three different database products, three unrelated product support teams, and a fourth organizational element dedicated to ensuring that the data in the other three could be reconciled. How was it then that everyone in the organization touted this situation as "the best," when clearly there was a much better approach to this entire functional area?