Why "Build vs Buy" is the Wrong Question

In big, enterprise IT departments, the question of build vs buy will often come up. A well intentioned leader will challenge a group Do we really want our talented (and expensive) engineers building this thing? This doesn't feel like our competitive advantage and there must be something off the shelf we can leverage instead. The intent of the question is good, but it lacks an important nuance. This post will describe this nuance, leveraging some very old, established ideas and my own experience. What is our core? The book Domain Driven Design was written in 2003 by Eric Evans. It's a book about software development, describing modelling your system to match your business domain. In a lot of ways, it's more like a book for business people who need to think about their enterprise architecture - rather than a deep technical one. In the book, he describes the idea of a business domain. I currently work for a company who's domain is scientific publishing. Within a business's domain though,…