Decision traces - Who owns them? A Case for Enterprise Sovereign Systems

How do we buy software?

A problem appears often, a category forms around it, and vendors emerge. A vendor is selected, and a contract is signed.

In Your SaaS Vendor’s Margin Is Your Opportunity, we named a quiet truth: Software vendors earn by generalizing away your edge cases. 

Vendors optimize for feature velocity. But organization systems evolve to ensure that the organization is not fragile. The greater the exactness of software, the fewer the edge cases that go unsolved and, more robust an organization becomes. Imagine if every exception leads to a patch that the software recognizes the next time and addresses it as a matter of routine! But is that how software is packaged today? No, because software today operates on data and not on organizational memory of how decisions are made. The outcome of such decisions is data. And data alone does not tell the story.

A vendor’s roadmap is shaped by the median customer. But your system? It is shaped by your people’s decisions, and those decisions come on the best days, worst days and in between. 

Your system should not be a collection of tools you layer over your work; that represents a lack of system. A system, when it does exist, should be the historian of your organization’s decisions. No vendor should own it. It's about your sovereignty.

AI models from vendors make decisions, agents take actions, and recommendations propagate across workflows. When these capabilities are vendor-owned and loosely integrated, enterprises inherit a new class of risk: outcomes they can neither predict nor fully explain. The decision loops don’t accrue to your central system as new patches to the memory. They stay locked in vendor systems.

So, invest in your sovereignty. That way, your system constrains vendors by design. It dictates where AI can act autonomously, where it must ask, where context lives, and who intervenes when behavior drifts. Vendors become components inside that system, not its authors. Their features are filtered, not adopted wholesale.

This is not an argument for building everything in-house. It is an argument for owning the seams – deciding where data is canonical, where decisions are logged, and where accountability resides. It means that replacing a vendor is expensive but possible, and integrating a new one is deliberate, not reactive. It means your system has memory, even when your vendors do not. And it is not solved by building a data lake.

Seen this way, vendor margin becomes legible. The margin you pay is not just for software – it is for relief from design responsibility. When enterprises abdicate that responsibility, vendors step in. When enterprises reclaim it, margin shifts back in the form of resilience, leverage, and optionality.

So, do enterprises that build systems of memory buy less software? No – but they buy differently. Vendors compete inside constraints rather than defining them. AI becomes governable rather than theatrical. And margin – real margin – shows up not as savings, but as control.

In the end, vendors are necessary. Memory of why/when/what happened and who authorized it is important. Systems that own and govern these are non-negotiable.

Remember, you read this here first: System sovereignty is not talked about, at all. Sovereign Memory Systems will emerge as a category and all tool/software vendors will plug into some sovereign system. It will be a bigger market than data lakes.

Until this happens, when someone knocks at the door selling context graphs, decision traces, knowledge base, etc., find out what happens when they leave. Negotiate to own the decision traces that define your organization.

Enjoy your Sunday!

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