The next big crisis isn't biological – it's digital

At Clarify, we meet a forward-leaning industry with a strong appetite for change every day. Many companies have invested heavily in in-house data platforms and applications. Historically, that may have been the right call: off-the-shelf software was either not good enough, or the technology vendors did not understand the user well enough. Many fish farmers chose to take matters into their own hands.

But we are now seeing a shift in the digital landscape that calls for a new approach. What many once saw as a competitive advantage, owning their own code, is becoming a significant strategic risk.

The vulnerability of person-dependent technology

The challenge with custom-built software is not necessarily the development itself, but the long-term ownership. Software is perishable: it needs continuous care, security updates and further development.

We often see critical internal systems resting on the shoulders of a few key people. What happens when the enthusiast who knows the system architecture moves on to new challenges? You go from having a tailor-made tool to sitting with a “black box” that is hard to maintain and risky to change. This creates a vulnerability that few boards would accept in biological production, but which is often overlooked on the digital side.

The battle for tech talent

It is a fact that the competition for the best IT talent is brutal. The top people in systems development and data analysis naturally gravitate towards places where technology is the core product. They are motivated by teams that challenge them on the latest tech stack and methods.

For an industrial company, no matter how large and professional, IT development will often remain a support function. That makes it hard to recruit, and above all to keep, the specialist expertise needed to keep an in-house platform world-class over time.

Value is created at the pen, not in the cloud

In the end, digital transformation is not about who owns the infrastructure, but about the value the tools deliver in day-to-day operations.

The companies succeeding now are those that realise they no longer need to build the foundation themselves. They are shifting from being software producers to becoming architects of their own digital operations. By combining specialised best-of-breed solutions, they gain a flexibility and pace of change that heavy in-house systems rarely match.

The winners will be those who connect the best tools on the market, tools that actually talk to each other, and make them available to the people running daily operations.

Strength through collaboration

This is not a criticism of those who have built their own systems, but a call for a strategic wake-up. The industry faces enormous opportunities in data and AI. But to unlock that potential, we have to reduce complexity, not add to it.

Let us build an environment where fish farmers are best at biology and operations, while technology companies compete to deliver the best, most user-friendly and open solutions.

Those who insist on building everything themselves end up financing their own irrelevance through technical debt. The competitive advantage of the future does not lie in owning code, but in the ability to make use of it.

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This op-ed was first published in Norwegian in IntraFish on 18 December 2025.

Link to original article: https://www.intrafish.no/debatt/den-neste-store-krisen-er-ikke-biologisk-den-er-digital/2-1-1915903