We have all heard it before from our engineering teams "but we can build this ourselves!" - I know this because I was one of those engineers. The problem with this statement is the inability to see the forest for the trees. As a large heavy industrial organization (aka oil and gas) the primary focus of the business is to move/process/extract oil and gas safely and efficiently, that is the forest. Individual engineers on a team are the trees. As a tree it may seem like a great idea to build complex software in house, well, because it would be a fun challenge! However, when you zoom out, there is so much more to be considered for a commercial grade enterprise software product for industrial automation, than just weather the technical competency exists within an organization. This vblog discusses specifically the time value of money consideration for in-house software projects and why despite my best efforts when I was working in industry, I was blocked from building a team inhouse to build commercial grade enterprise software, and why that was the correct business decision for that organization (despite my sad feelings at the time!).