Technology is an interesting beast that seems to multiply into subsequent smaller beasts as every day goes by. Case in point, the technology market as a whole is prone to highly siloed, highly complex services and solutions firms—all of which are needed, yet never speak to one another—that leads the customer to suffer through managing all of these disparate entities with no real insight as to who actually owns what.

It’s like the Gremlins movie come to life. But instead of little furry things turning into monsters, instead you get little monsters that are wearing golf shirts and know stuff about IT. Okay, maybe I shouldn’t go that far as a joke, but hear me out.

Take any technology scenario and apply it to any sub-category of your liking. In this instance, I will speak from my own experience related to digital customer engagement solutions. For years and right up to the present day, our industry has suffered from the “multiplying monsters” paradigm.

From mobile app developers to CDP developers to marketing automation developers—every single one of these types of companies has a single point of entry to the market, and therefore a single point of responsibility to the customer. And this is where projects continually go sideways.

Let’s use a restaurateur as a market example. Successful people in the restaurant business are a combination of two distinct traits: culinary talent paired with business acumen. And to be real, that’s a double talent already—something that should be praised. So how far must that talent go?

If they are already busy running a successful restaurant chain and want to implement a next-generation engagement strategy to rollout across multiple locations to make their customers even happier, how much of their day job should they give up to do it? Do they also now need to become an IT professional? A mobile app development professional? A marketing automation development professional? How much is too much?

Even if they are not doing the actual implementation of these highly complex scenarios, they better know enough to stay on top of the inevitable finger-pointing, project creep and, at best, stay on top of vendor management to keep everyone in check. And trust me when I say, I’ve lived this firsthand.

Straight up, these solutions are highly complex from development to management to implementation, everything is hard. That is if you’re contending with those “little multiplying monsters.”

This is where vendor selection is critical. In my adult career I was given a great piece of advice: keep your talent consolidated and close. Now I find myself imparting the same wisdom on a frequent basis.

If we were to tell the same example of the restauranteur, but instead of multiple vendors they chose one partner with a holistic solution set that addressed everything, including the mobile app, the CDP, the marketing automation—suddenly the complexity disappears. Now, that same restauranteur can go back to concentrating on the business, while the vendor partner takes care of managing all of the complexities under one roof—complexities that shouldn’t be complicated as it’s what they do for a living every day.

You see, the complexity comes from the idea that disparate systems and vendors never truly work out the way they promise. The relational aspects of their respective solutions, how the technology connects and works together, paired with how people interact, often leads the customer to manage far too much for the investment.

The lesson here is that it’s never your job to manage or solve complexity. It’s your job to hire the right vendor, leave the complexity to the professionals to work on your behalf, and for you to ultimately bask in the success of a choice well made.

Now, tell me you’re not tempted to rewatch Gremlins this weekend. 😉