Buy vs Build: Why Australian Organisations Should Not Build Their Own Knowledge Platform
Australian organisations are drowning in siloed information. Documents, conversations, and data are scattered across CRMs, collaboration platforms, shared drives, and legacy systems. Simultaneously, the rise of hybrid work has permanently changed how teams operate. Employees now expect to be able to find the right information instantly, whether they are at home, in the office, or on site. This new reality raises the bar dramatically: organisations don’t just need search; they need fast, secure, and context-aware answers which are accessible anywhere, anytime, and aligned with strict compliance requirements.
Faced with this challenge, many leaders are tempted to build an internal knowledge platform. On paper, the logical choice: greater control, tailored workflows, and ownership of the architecture. But in practice, this path almost always disappoints. Building in-house routinely leads to budget overruns, delayed timelines, low adoption, and ongoing security exposure. What looks like control at the outset quickly becomes a burden, an expensive distraction that diverts critical resources away from the organisation’s real mission.
By contrast, buying a proven platform like Glean (glean.com), implemented with KeyData’s local expertise, creates a very different outcome. Glean is not a single application or point solution. It is a Work AI platform designed to unify knowledge across systems, break down silos, and deliver context-aware insights directly into the flow of work.
KeyData ensures that Australian organisations implement Glean quickly, adopt it widely, and optimise it continuously for maximum impact. The result is accelerated business value, hardened compliance with Australian and standard international regulations, and adoption rates that sustain long-term transformation.
For executives under pressure to improve productivity, reduce risk, and unlock innovation within a known budget, the choice is clear: building creates risk; buying creates results.
10 Australian Stats Leaders Can’t Ignore, and why Glean makes sense…
The challenges facing Australian organisations are not abstract. They are measurable, expensive, and compounding every year. From productivity loss to cyber exposure, the data paints a clear picture: employees are spending too much time searching, systems remain dangerously fragmented, and innovation is stalling. At the same time, regulatory pressures, hybrid work, and increasing project complexity mean leaders cannot afford to get this wrong.
The following ten statistics highlight the scale of the issue and why the decision to BUY GLEAN, NOT BUILD, a knowledge platform, is the correct one.
1. 41% of Australian employees spend more than 1 hour per day searching internal systems for files/info. (idm.net.au)
That is more than five hours per week per employee wasted simply trying to find what they need to do their jobs. At enterprise scale, this translates into tens of thousands of lost hours every year; hours that should be spent serving customers, innovating, and driving growth.
How much productivity is your organisation losing because employees can’t quickly find the knowledge they need?
Glean unifies knowledge across all your systems and delivers context-aware answers instantly. Unlike custom-built platforms, Glean is proven to drive high adoption and speed, eliminating wasted time and reclaiming productivity.
2. 22% of Australian businesses experienced a cyber incident in 2021–22. (ABS)
That is nearly one in four organisations. This is proof that cyber risk is not a distant possibility; it is a constant reality. As data sprawls across CRMs, collaboration tools, file shares, and legacy systems, the attack surface grows. Internal teams building custom platforms are rarely equipped to keep up with the relentless evolution of security threats, leaving dangerous gaps.
Is your organisation confident that an in-house platform can match enterprise-grade security and keep pace with evolving cyber risks?
Glean continuously invests in enterprise-grade security and compliance frameworks, including globally recognised certifications and ongoing penetration testing. By contrast, in-house builds struggle to maintain the same level of protection, leaving organisations exposed to avoidable risk.
3. Average financial loss per business incident reported to ASD was $39k+ in 2022–23. (Cyber.gov.au)
For many organisations, that’s just the beginning. Beyond the direct financial hit, breaches can trigger regulatory scrutiny, erode customer trust, and stall critical business operations. A single incident can cost far more than the price of prevention, especially if it exposes the weaknesses of a fragile, in-house system.
How much risk is your organisation taking on by relying on internally developed platforms that aren’t built to withstand today’s cyber threats?
Glean is designed with enterprise-grade security at its core. By choosing Glean, organisations avoid the hidden risks of under-secured internal builds, reducing financial exposure while protecting both business continuity and reputation.
4. 36% of Australians were working from home regularly as of Aug 2024. (News.com.au)
Hybrid work is no longer the exception; it has become the norm. This is the new world of work. It is now the norm. However, as employees toggle between home and office, knowledge often remains locked inside fragmented systems. In-house platforms rarely deliver the seamless, remote-ready experience employees now expect.
Is your organisation giving teams the answers they need, wherever they work?
Glean is purpose-built for hybrid work. It delivers instant, context-aware answers across all systems, empowering employees to stay productive and connected, anytime, anywhere.
5. 71% of project professionals say projects are becoming more complex. (AIPM/KPMG)
As complexity grows, so does the risk of projects missing deadlines, blowing out budgets, or failing altogether. Building an in-house knowledge platform often adds to that risk, becoming just another stalled initiative.
How confident are you that your knowledge platform won’t become another failed project?
With Glean, success is measured in weeks, not years. Fast, proven implementations eliminate complexity, reduce risk, and ensure organisations see value quickly.
6. Only ~46% of Australian firms were innovation-active in 2022–23. (ABS BCS)
That means more than half of businesses struggle to dedicate time and resources to innovation. Building and maintaining internal platforms only makes this harder, draining focus away from strategic priorities.
Is your organisation investing in innovation, or being held back by maintaining in-house tools?
Glean frees up time and resources for what matters most. By delivering instant answers out of the box, Glean empowers teams to focus on innovation and growth, not platform maintenance.
7. Globally, 61% of developers spend >30 minutes/day searching for answers. (Stack Overflow)
That’s hours every week lost to friction, time that could be spent building, shipping, and innovating. Developers don’t want another system to manage; they want fast, reliable answers in the tools they already use. In-house platforms rarely deliver that seamless experience.
How much developer productivity is your organisation losing to wasted search time?
Glean integrates directly into Slack, Jira, and GitHub, meeting developers where they work and delivering instant, context-aware answers. Unlike bespoke platforms, Glean boosts adoption because it fits seamlessly into the developer workflow.
8. Forrester TEI found Glean delivers 141% ROI with payback <6 months. (Forrester/Glean)
Executives need more than promises—they need measurable, board-defensible returns. Internal builds rarely deliver clear, quantifiable ROI, let alone pay back in under half a year.
How quickly is your organisation realising value from its knowledge investments?
With Glean, ROI isn’t hypothetical; it’s proven. Fast time-to-value and measurable returns make Glean a low-risk, high-reward investment for organisations that need impact now, not years later.
9. The composite organisation in Forrester’s TEI gained 110 hours/employee/year and 36 hours faster onboarding. (Forrester)
Why Buy Glean:
These are proven benchmarks. A bespoke build has no evidence of delivering anywhere near these outcomes.
10. Australian knowledge workers often access 4+ systems to find information; 36% of the day can be lost consolidating it. (idm.net.au)
Why Buy Glean:
Glean unifies all systems with 100+ permission-aware connectors. Building requires years of ongoing integrations that most internal teams cannot sustain.
Why Some Leaders Still Consider Building
When I speak with executives across industries, the idea of building an internal knowledge platform often surfaces as an option. At first glance, it feels strategic and even reassuring.
Leaders point to three key drivers:
The Appeal:
- Control: By designing and owning the architecture, the organisation believes it can dictate exactly how data is structured, accessed, and secured. This sense of control is a safer, lower-risk path for boards and executives, particularly in highly regulated sectors like finance, government, and healthcare.
- Customisation: Every enterprise has unique workflows, approval processes, and governance models. The idea of creating something built specifically for those needs is appealing. Leaders imagine that a bespoke system can reflect the nuances of their business in a way that off-the-shelf platforms cannot.
- Capability: Large organisations often employ skilled developers, engineers, and IT teams. It can be tempting to assume these teams can “spin up” a solution without excessive cost or risk. After all, if the talent already exists internally, why not use it?
These arguments resonate on paper. They appeal to executives’ instincts for control, alignment, and maximising internal resources. But they overlook the complexity of what’s really involved.
The Reality:
The hard truth is that building a knowledge platform isn’t just a project. It is the creation of a permanent product. And a product of this scale requires ongoing investment: continuous AI model improvements, constant UX refinement, evergreen security hardening, and new integrations and maintenance for existing integrations with hundreds of fast-evolving business systems.
It’s not the coding that kills most builds, it’s the complexity and governance. Integrating multiple systems, managing compliance requirements, and ensuring high adoption rates are challenges few internal teams are resourced to handle for the long haul.
The evidence backs this up. According to the AIPM/KPMG Future of Project Management Report, more than 70% of Australian project professionals say projects are becoming more complex yearly. Building a bespoke knowledge platform doesn’t reduce that complexity; it magnifies it. And while leaders often start with the belief that their teams can manage, in reality, many of these initiatives stall, balloon in cost, or deliver systems that employees simply don’t use.
In other words, what begins as a plan for control and alignment often ends as a cautionary tale.
The Hidden Costs & Risks of Building
On paper, building a bespoke knowledge platform looks attractive: control, flexibility, and alignment. However, the reality for Australian organisations is very different. Behind the promise lie hidden costs, risks, and distractions that can derail even the best-intentioned projects.
Here are 12 reasons why building is the wrong choice, and how Glean avoids each pitfall.
1. Time & Budget Overruns
Australian IT projects are notoriously complex. According to AIPM/KPMG, 71% of project professionals say projects are becoming more complex yearly. This complexity translates into missed deadlines and spiralling budgets. Bespoke platforms, with multiple system integrations and compliance overlays, are particularly prone to failure.
How Glean Helps: With 100+ prebuilt permission-aware connectors and proven deployment models, Glean delivers value fast without scope creep. A typical Phase 1 with ready-to-go Glean connectors can have core functionality available in weeks to months, not years, at an accurate budgetable cost.
2. Low Adoption
Even the best-engineered system fails if employees don’t use it. 41% of Australian employees already spend over an hour per day searching for information (IDM.net.au). If the in-house platform is slow or unintuitive, people revert to old habits: saving files to drives, pinging colleagues, or emailing attachments.
How Glean Helps: Glean integrates into Slack, Teams, Jira, Salesforce, and GitHub, meeting employees where they already work. That’s why global customers see 65–98% adoption rates, far higher than any home-grown build.
3. Data Governance across data silos
Data governance issues across data silos often arise when building custom knowledge management and AI platforms. Disparate systems lead to inconsistencies, fragmented data practices, and difficulty enforcing unified policies for security, access, and data quality. Without strong governance, sensitive information may be accidentally overshared, and data integration becomes time-consuming, increasing operational risk and reducing efficiency.
How Glean Helps: Glean enables an enterprise-wide approach that breaks down organisational barriers and connects disparate systems. By orchestrating comprehensive protocols for data access, usage, and safeguarding, Glean ensures consistent, secure, and compliant data management wherever it resides in the organisation. This unified framework not only eliminates inefficiencies and fragmentation but also fosters reliable, up-to-date information for decision-making while supporting compliance with regulatory requirements.
4. Agent Sprawl and Exploding Costs
Most office staff will have at least one subscription to an agent, such as MS CoPilot; many will have separate agents for Visual Studio, ChatGPT, AI Subscriptions within various apps, and Salesforce. The list goes on.
This has 2 distinct dangers that are often under the radar:
- Multiple agents under disparate contracts and agreements introduce many risks
- The average cost per employee for these tools is more than most organisations understand or expect
How Glean Helps: Glean replaces the need for multiple agents while offering staff access to context-rich models (that you allow) based on your own Knowledge Management platform. Glean guarantees no data is retained outside your dedicated Glean Infrastructure.
5. Maintenance Burden
Custom systems often depend on a handful of engineers who understand the architecture. When they leave, the platform becomes brittle and costly to maintain. A Queensland organisation learned this the hard way: after losing its lead developers, its custom platform became unusable and was abandoned at a loss.
How Glean Helps: Glean is backed by a dedicated product and engineering team that continuously releases updates, integrations, and security enhancements, removing the risk of talent attrition.
6. Productivity Drain
Poor access to knowledge is a hidden productivity killer. Studies show that Australian knowledge workers often juggle 4+ systems daily, losing up to 36% of their day consolidating information (IDM.net.au). Building an internal system often adds another silo, compounding rather than solving the problem.
How Glean Helps: Glean unifies all systems into a single search and discovery “Knowledge Map” layer, reclaiming wasted time. A Forrester TEI study found organisations using Glean saved 110 hours per employee per year.
7. Security & Compliance Exposure
Australia has some of the strictest privacy and cybersecurity regulations in the world. Yet 22% of Australian businesses reported cyber incidents in 2021–22, with an average loss of $39,000 per incident (ABS, ACSC). An in-house system rarely meets the same level of continuous compliance as enterprise-grade vendors.
How Glean Helps: Glean offers both SaaS and customer-hosted deployments, with compliance baked in, including support for data sovereignty. Glean complies with globally recognised security standards relevant to Australian organisations, including ISO 27001, SOC 2, and maintains ongoing penetration testing to support robust information security and regulatory compliance.
8. Hidden Cultural Resistance
Custom platforms often underestimate the human factor. If the system doesn’t align with how people already work, employees reject it. In 2023, a Victorian government agency spent years and millions building its own platform, only to see staff revert to shared drives and email because adoption was too low.
How Glean Helps: Glean’s AI-driven, intuitive experience makes it as easy as consumer search tools, ensuring adoption becomes natural rather than forced.
9. Opportunity Cost
Every dollar spent building a bespoke platform is a dollar diverted from core mission or innovation. With only 46% of Australian businesses classified as “innovation active” in 2022–23 (ABS BCS), diverting scarce resources away from growth and innovation is a strategic mistake.
How Glean Helps: Glean is proven to deliver 141% ROI with payback under 6 months (Forrester), freeing executives to focus investment on business innovation, not IT experiments.
10. Integration Complexity
Most Australian organisations run a patchwork of legacy and modern tools: CRMs, ticketing systems, shared drives, and collaboration platforms. Building bespoke integrations is slow and brittle. Every system upgrade requires additional coding and maintenance.
How Glean Helps: Glean ships with 100+ prebuilt connectors, ensuring information flows seamlessly across existing systems, without requiring constant reinvention.
11. Stalled Transformation
Hybrid work is now a permanent feature: 36% of Australians worked from home regularly as of August 2024 (News.com.au). Employees demand frictionless, anywhere access. An internal build often lags behind these expectations, slowing digital transformation.
How Glean Helps: Glean is designed for hybrid and remote work environments, delivering secure, fast knowledge access wherever employees are located.
12. Reputational Risk
When internal platforms fail, whether through poor adoption, cost blowouts, or security breaches, the reputational damage to leadership is significant. In sectors like banking, healthcare, and government, this can also trigger regulatory scrutiny.
How Glean Helps: With a global customer base and proven benchmarks, Glean is a low-risk, high-trust choice. Partnering with KeyData ensures Australian compliance, adoption success, and measurable outcomes.
Summarily: Building multiplies risk. Buying multiplies value.
The Case for Buying Glean: 7 Reasons Leaders Can’t Ignore
Building your own platform is a gamble when it comes to unlocking knowledge across complex enterprises. Glean, implemented by KeyData, is a proven accelerator. Here are seven reasons why executives across Australia should invest in the Glean & KeyData solution today.
1. Proven ROI That Boards Can Defend
Independent analysis from Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study found that organisations using Glean achieved a 141% return on investment with payback in under 6 months. That ROI was driven by reduced time wasted searching, faster onboarding, and lower support costs.
2. Measurable Productivity Gains
The same Forrester study reported that enterprises saved 110 hours per employee, per year through faster search and streamlined workflows. In addition, onboarding times dropped by 36 hours per employee, accelerating time-to-value for new hires.
3. Speed to Value: Weeks, Not Years
While bespoke builds take years to design and deploy, Glean customers achieve full rollouts in weeks to months. With over 100 prebuilt connectors for tools like Salesforce, Slack, Jira, Confluence, and ServiceNow, knowledge flows quickly without the need for custom integration overhead.
4. Adoption at Scale
Adoption is the make-or-break factor in knowledge management. Unlike clunky internal platforms, Glean is embedded directly into everyday tools. Real-world customers report adoption rates ranging from 65% to 98%, sustaining cultural change rather than becoming “just another system.”
5. Security That Matches Australian Standards
In 2021–22, 22% of Australian businesses experienced a cyber incident, with an average financial loss of over $ 39,000 per breach. Glean mitigates this risk with enterprise-grade security, regular penetration testing, and compliance with global and Australian standards. Organisations can deploy in SaaS mode or host in their own cloud to meet APRA, Privacy Act, and data sovereignty requirements.
6. Hybrid Work Without Friction
As of August 2024, 36% of Australians work from home regularly (News.com.au), so hybrid access is no longer optional. Glean is built for distributed teams, providing fast, context-aware answers wherever employees are located without VPN bottlenecks or outdated interfaces.
7. Competitive Edge Through Innovation
Only 46% of Australian businesses were considered innovation-active in 2022–23 (ABS BCS). Enterprises bogged down by wasted time and poor access to knowledge fall further behind. By reclaiming lost hours and enabling more intelligent decision-making, Glean frees teams to focus on innovation, customer experience, and growth.
Evidence in Practice: 10 Examples with Outcomes
Real-world outcomes tell the story more clearly than theory.
Across industries, companies that chose Glean saw measurable adoption and ROI within weeks, results that homegrown builds almost never achieve.
1. Confluent
As a fast-scaling data streaming leader, Confluent needed to cut time wasted on repetitive support investigations. By deploying Glean, they saved over 15,000 hours monthly, reduced ticket handling time by 5–10 minutes per ticket, and achieved an active adoption rate of over 70%.
2. Wealthsimple
Wealthsimple wanted to scale financial services without scaling inefficiency. With Glean embedded into daily workflows, 98% of employees actively use the platform, resulting in $1.03M in annual savings from the time reclaimed across teams.
3. Webflow
At Webflow, knowledge lived across dozens of siloed apps, slowing design and engineering teams. Glean unified their systems and delivered a 3× ROI, with 65% of employees using it regularly to save hours every week.
4. Leading Financial Software Provider
This global financial software leader faced ballooning support costs and duplicated work. Glean helped reclaim 3,000+ hours every month, unlocked $2.3M in annual value, and drove 80%+ adoption with 78% monthly active use.
5. Super.com
Rapid growth had left Super.com with scattered knowledge, hindering onboarding and productivity. Glean transformed access, saving 1,500+ hours monthly, speeding onboarding by 20%, and giving employees back 20 minutes daily.
6. Upside
As Upside expanded its marketplace, knowledge gaps threatened service quality. Glean ensured 92% adoption across staff, saving 2,000+ hours each month, and embedding knowledge discovery into their operating rhythm.
7. Duolingo
With teams distributed globally, Duolingo struggled with duplicated effort and inconsistent access to resources. Glean cut duplication, saving 500+ hours monthly, and delivered a 5× ROI by improving knowledge flow across the business.
8. Databricks
Data teams at Databricks were spending time switching between tools just to find answers. By consolidating search into Glean, they increased engagement, reduced wasted navigation time, and gave engineers faster access to what mattered.
9. Grammarly
Supporting millions of users meant support staff needed instant answers across platforms. Glean is integrated with Slack, Confluence, Zendesk, and Google Drive, enabling faster resolution times and dramatically improving customer experience.
10. Cro Metrics
Cro Metrics struggled to find key resources in its growing volume of documentation, slowing onboarding, decision-making, and overall productivity. By using Glean, employees can instantly locate information, enabling faster onboarding, better decisions, and uninterrupted workflows that support efficient scaling.
Why KeyData + Glean (and Why Now)
Technology alone doesn’t guarantee success. The difference between a transformative project and a failed IT investment lies in choosing the right platform and partner. Glean delivers the world’s most advanced Work AI platform, using context-aware AI models with permission-aware access to all enterprise applications for smarter, faster business answers. KeyData ensures it is deployed, adopted, and optimised to deliver measurable outcomes for Australian enterprises.
Here are five reasons why partnering with KeyData and Glean is the right decision now:
1. Local Compliance & Data Sovereignty Expertise
Australia has some of the strictest privacy and data regulations in the world, from the Privacy Act reforms to APRA CPS 234. KeyData ensures every deployment of Glean aligns with local compliance requirements. With customer-hosted options in AWS or GCP, Australian enterprises can retain full control of data residency while benefiting from global best practices in compliance and security.
2. Proven Methodology: Adoption First, Value Always
Most technology projects fail not because the tech doesn’t work, but because employees don’t use it. KeyData’s methodology is built around adoption as the number one success factor. We embed Glean into the workflow, deliver executive-level reporting on adoption, and continuously optimise for value. Our mantra is simple but powerful: adoption first, value always.
3. Deep Ecosystem Expertise
KeyData isn’t just Australia’s premier Glean partner; we’re also the leading integration partner for the modern data stack: Snowflake, Tableau, Fivetran, Coalesce, WhereScape, DBT, Microsoft, Salesforce, and DataRobot. This means we don’t just deploy Glean in isolation; we connect it seamlessly into your entire ecosystem, turning silos into a unified, intelligent knowledge layer. Our deeply rooted skills in Structured and semi-structured data, blended with our partnership and integration skills with Glea,n allow us to surface strategic data assets from your Data Lakes and Data Marts, in hand with contextual information from other unstructured data sources, for instantly deeper natural language conversations with all your data!
4. Speed to Measurable Outcomes
Executives can’t wait years to see results. With Glean + KeyData, outcomes arrive fast. Using 100+ prebuilt connectors and proven deployment templates, we deliver production rollouts in weeks and months, not years. That means employees reclaim lost time almost immediately, and leadership sees value without the risk of multi-year build projects.
5. A Strategic Partner for the Long Term
KeyData doesn’t treat implementation as the finish line. We are inherently an enablement partner, and it is the starting point. We provide continuous optimisation, change management support, and roadmap alignment, enabling enterprises to evolve alongside Glean. In an era where hybrid work, AI adoption, and regulatory changes are accelerating, you need a partner committed to your long-term success, not just during the rollout.
Conclusion
Building a bespoke knowledge platform in Australia may appear strategic, but in reality, it is a high-risk detour. These projects are expensive to create, fragile to maintain, and notoriously slow to deliver any tangible value. Too often, they drain budgets, frustrate employees, and ultimately collapse under the weight of complexity and low adoption. What starts as an ambitious IT initiative frequently ends as a cautionary tale.
By contrast, buying Glean, implemented by KeyData, offers a proven, low-risk path forward. Instead of pouring resources into reinventing the wheel, Australian enterprises gain immediate access to a world-class platform, built for scale, security, and adoption.
The results are not theoretical. The results are measurable. Glean consistently delivers faster employee onboarding, shorter customer resolution times, millions of dollars in reclaimed productivity, and adoption rates that sustain cultural change.
With KeyData’s expertise in compliance, integration, and change management, those outcomes are not just possible; they are predictable. Together, Glean and KeyData transform knowledge chaos into business clarity, enabling leaders to focus on what matters most: driving growth, fostering innovation, and keeping pace in a rapidly changing market.
The choice is stark but simple: building creates risk, buying creates results.
For Australian organisations determined to compete and thrive, the winning formula is clear,
Glean as the platform. KeyData as the partner. Buy, don’t build.
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