Every bridge
is temporary. In theory.
Buy now, build later is a sound strategy and a common lie. Four conditions tell them apart — and this watches whether yours still hold.
Open the toolNot a decision tool.
A standing check on one you already made.
Buy now, build later is a sound strategy. It is also the most comfortable thing to say about a vendor you are never going to leave. The two are indistinguishable on the day the decision is made — and they diverge quietly, over quarters, while nobody is looking at the thing that would tell them apart.
A bridge that breaks one of its four conditions is no longer a bridge. It is permanent dependency with temporary language around it.
This tool holds the four conditions and asks you to rate them again — not once, at signing, but whenever something moves. The build loses its engineer. The vendor adds a proprietary export format. The migration date passes and nothing happens. Each is survivable alone; each is also how a bridge becomes the architecture.
All four hold,
or it is not a bridge.
Vendor solution bounded
No proprietary data models. No deep API dependencies. A defined interface the internal build can eventually replace cleanly. A vendor solution adopted without these constraints is not a bridge — it is a dependency with a bridge narrative attached to it.
Build is real
Protected engineering capacity, a committed timeline, a named owner. If the internal build does not have all three, the vendor solution becomes permanent by default — and the bridge becomes the architecture.
Migration planned before the vendor is contracted
Exit criteria defined at selection, not negotiated afterwards. An exit planned after the relationship begins is a renegotiation, and renegotiations favor the incumbent.
Business need genuine and immediate
Real operational pressure, not politically accelerated urgency. The bridge approach exists to satisfy the first. It is not a mechanism for accommodating the second with architectural consequences.
One reading,
not two numbers to reconcile.
A bridge is judged on two independent things: whether its conditions still hold, and whether its migration is actually happening. They can disagree — and when they do, that disagreement is the finding.
The conditions
Each rated met, at risk or broken, with the evidence beside it. One broken condition ends the bridge; an unrated one is reported as unrated, never quietly passed.
The clock
Days to the planned migration, and how far past it you are. A bridge whose conditions all hold but whose exit date went by six months ago is not healthy — it is on its way to permanent.
The ending
Migrated, superseded, abandoned, or reclassified as permanent. Four different outcomes, kept apart, so the pattern in how your bridges finish is readable.
Every re-assessment is kept. The history is the point: a condition that slid from met to at risk to broken over three quarters tells you something no single reading can, and it tells you when.
Build vs Buy vs Partner is where the decision gets made. It weighs whether a capability is strategic, whether an external option fits, and what each path costs — and a bridge is one of the four answers it can reach.
This tool starts the day after. It assumes the decision is made and asks the only question that matters from then on: is it still true? The same four conditions appear in both, and that is deliberate — but there they are a gate you pass once, and here they are a reading you take again and again.
If a condition cannot be confirmed at the outset, there is no bridge to monitor. There is a vendor decision to make, and Build vs Buy vs Partner is the tool for it.
Record a bridge when you commit to one — while the constraints you negotiated are still fresh and the exit criteria are still written down somewhere. A bridge reconstructed from memory a year later loses precisely the detail that would have told you it had stopped being one.
Then re-rate it when something moves, not on a schedule. The build lead changes. The contract renews. The migration date passes. Those are the moments a bridge quietly becomes permanent, and they are the moments worth writing down.
Keep the word temporary
meaning something.
Record the bridges you have committed to, rate the four conditions as they stand, and re-rate them as things move. The ones that stop being bridges will say so — in your own evidence, early enough to act on.
Open the tool