[LinkedIn Post]
Most RIA firms think their data problem is architectural. The real problem is coordination.
Joe Reis recently wrote about pendulums in data: organizations swing from centralized control (bottlenecks) to decentralized ownership (fragmentation), then back again. Each swing solves the immediate pain while creating the conditions for the next crisis.
RIA firms are caught in the same cycle. Documents arrive, one person processes them. Growth makes that unbearable, so firms decentralize. Now advisors upload directly, teams own their folders, and chaos returns. The pendulum swings back toward a new platform that promises to fix it. Six months later, the same problem appears in a different shape.
Faster tools do not solve coordination friction. Neither does better architecture.
Firms moving fastest on automation stopped debating centralization and started building the coordination layer underneath: shared semantics, data contracts, identity infrastructure. That layer does not care whether documents are processed centrally or distributed. It just makes sure data moves correctly.
Every architecture becomes its own counterforce eventually. The better question: what coordination work has to happen first, before the technology choice even matters?
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