There’s a figure of speech in the English language we’re all familiar with: something “slipped through the cracks.”
It applies just as well in business. Think about every department, team, system or process that has a boundary or handoff with another. Those are exactly the places where things tend to slip through the cracks.
And we’ve all seen, and lived, examples.
Take insurance. Imagine a customer contacts the service team with a complaint. The team acknowledges it and resolves it. They do everything required by the process, including logging the reason for the complaint and noting that the customer is at risk of leaving.
End of story? Not quite.
Ideally, the retention team would then be notified of that risk so it could act. Instead, the team finds out months later, when the customer doesn’t renew their policy.
The service process worked as intended. What was missing was the connection to retention. In other words, the customer’s flight risk slipped through the cracks.
This happens in several familiar places at organisations globally:
- Service to retention, as in the example above.
- Sales to delivery, where expectations set by the team selling the work fail to reach the team doing it.
- Operations to product, where recurring workarounds never become product improvements.
- Partner to direct sales, where two teams approach the same customer without knowing it.
If these gaps are so common, why haven’t they already been addressed?
One reason is that the business case often sits between functions. Fixing the problem requires work across two parts of the organisation, but neither function owner wants to commit the entire budget while sharing the benefit (and the credit) with another.
The economics begin to change when you change the architecture and paradigm.
Instead of building a separate bridge for every crossing, each function can expose approved capabilities through a common interface that other parts of the organisation can use. The function retains control, while the cost of making the next connection falls.
Implementation doesn’t disappear. But once the interface exists, coordination and governance become the bigger questions. Starting with executive direction to ensure organisational priority.
Assuming executive direction, the way forward is to identify every point where something important can slip through the cracks and ask: who owns the outcome, and who can approve the business case to fix it?
Where there is no clear name, you’ve got a shortlist for pivoting to this approach.
Something to leave you with: research published in August 2026 found that 41% of Australian organisations cited weak or unclear business cases as a barrier to large-scale AI investment, while 32% cited difficulty coordinating across IT, data, security and business teams.
They are different findings, but they point towards the same underlying challenge: the hardest opportunities to fund are often the ones that sit between established owners.
Source: HCLTech, Scaling Enterprise AI in Australia, August 2026.