Over the years, IT has had the ability to customize the heck out of applications. Even the industry enabled this addiction to feature creep. Vendors asked what new button, bell, and whistle customers wanted and then delivered what they could. Customization became a hallmark of IT trying to ultimately please the customer and meet their ever-changing requirements.
Custom configurations lead to the ability to do more and increase the value of the application/ service to the user. As the number of customizations increased, so did the level of complexity. Eventually, that very flexibility and customization starts to work against the value of the customizations themselves.
There is another nasty side effect with customization. It creates a sort of lock-in. Essentially, the further a solution is customized, the more unique it is and the harder it is to leverage alternative solutions. The customizations create such a unique solution that alternative solutions struggle to compete against. That is, unless they offer the exact same features and functionality…and customization options.