> The second common variant is, instead of centralizing a service so that everyone in the company uses it, every department does it on their own. Department managers like it because it’s one less party not reporting to them to depend on (and nothing scares managers more than needing things from people not reporting to them.) And the people managing the department managers like it because they don’t need to deal with the centralized service department allegedly failing — and having to figure out if that’s really true and how to fix it, or if it’s an excuse made up by the other departments for failing at their own job. Here, too, if outcomes are what concerns you rather than what's easiest for senior leadership, standardizing on something across the company vs having everyone roll their own variant is a hard decision to make.

The argument is that centralization is the better outcome, even if it's less appealing to leadership. My counter argument is that centralization has downsides that need to be considered; it isn't inherently better.