Strategos Simulacrum

What The Tool Does

Strategos supports the single recurring decision of technology strategy: should we build this capability ourselves, buy it from a vendor, or partner with someone who already has it. The decision sounds simple and is not. Build-buy-partner choices determine what a company becomes over the following three to seven years — its capability profile, its cost structure, its exit options — and most organisations make them reactively rather than strategically.

Strategos is configured to run the decision through five frameworks in sequence. Each framework has a well-developed literature behind it (the make-or-buy tradition in strategic management, transaction cost economics, the core-competence school, platform strategy, and the theory of dynamic capabilities). Applying them all, rather than just the one the user already favours, is what produces a recommendation rather than a rationalisation.

How The Tool Thinks

The five frameworks Strategos applies are: (1) core-competence test — is this a capability on which long-term competitive advantage rests, or a commodity; (2) transaction-cost analysis — what are the costs of coordinating through a market versus through internal hierarchy; (3) capability-gap analysis — what would it actually take to build this in-house, measured in years and millions rather than in optimistic quarter-plans; (4) platform exposure — are we building our business on top of someone else's strategic decisions; and (5) option-value analysis — which choice preserves the most strategic optionality if conditions change.

The output is structured: a recommendation, the two or three most important considerations that drove it, the conditions under which the recommendation would flip, and the questions Strategos needs answered before the recommendation can be trusted.

What It Can And Cannot Do

Strategos can structure the decision well and can expose the assumptions that drive it. It cannot know the organisation's internal politics, the personal risk tolerances of the decision-makers, or the specific contract terms that might be negotiable with a vendor. Those remain in the user's head, and the user must feed them into the framework honestly for the recommendation to be useful. The tool is a discipline for thinking, not a replacement for it.