With this Salesforce-Informatica deal, we’re essentially watching them buy their 'seagrass basket'—an attempt to create the illusion of order.
In enterprise tech, adding new tools indiscriminately often masquerades as progress. Salesforce’s Informatica bid exposes a deeper issue: as data sprawls and AI anxiety grows, quick fixes mask systemic failures in integration and trust.
Christine Haskell, Ph.D., is a Principal Consultant at Dative.works, with a breadth of experience spanning Yahoo, Microsoft, and Salesforce. She focuses on the human side of enterprise transformation and sees the Salesforce-Informatica deal not as a move for capability, but a grasp for coherence.
The illusion of order: "With this Salesforce-Informatica deal, we’re essentially watching them buy their 'seagrass basket'—an attempt to create the illusion of order," says Haskell. "It’s what we do when we move into a new space. Before we understand how it should function, we buy bins, rearrange furniture, and try to make it look organized. It’s anxiety management, not strategy."
But real coherence, she warns, isn’t cosmetic. "It’s not about snapping parts together or rushing to standardize. It’s about pausing to ask if the pieces actually fit operationally, ethically, and culturally."
Money can't buy everything: Haskell is careful to distinguish between the value of the acquisition and the risks of misapplication. "This isn’t a bad deal on paper," she says. "Informatica brings depth in governance, metadata, and data quality—exactly the capabilities Salesforce needs." But whether this is a turning point or just another patch depends entirely on how seriously they treat integration and alignment. "You can’t buy your way out of systemic incoherence," Haskell explains. "You have to lead your way through it."
Quest for coherence: "The deeper signal here isn’t just about data. It’s about trust," says Haskell. She sees the acquisition as Salesforce trying to position itself as a steward of enterprise data, addressing a long-standing gap: "the absence of mature, enterprise-grade governance capabilities. This isn’t just about adding tools—it’s about trying to buy coherence."
“Coherence is the quality of decisions, designs, and systems reinforcing one another to create a unified, trustworthy experience, where everything feels intentional, interconnected, and aligned," explains Haskell. "Think Apple under Steve Jobs. Coherence wasn’t just aesthetic; it was operational clarity.” But coherence can’t be bought. "That coherence built trust, and that’s what Salesforce is still missing." For years, the company has leaned on third-party implementers to make its ecosystem usable. "This deal is about patching a coherence gap," she says. "And that’s not something you can outsource. It signals urgency—and vulnerability."
Psychologically, we crave certainty, especially in unfamiliar environments. And AI is deeply unfamiliar, which amps the anxiety and triggers FOMO.
Patchwork problems: This situation isn't unique to Salesforce; it reflects a broader industry inflection point. "For years the dominant model in enterprise software was best of breed," Haskell notes, leading to a "patchwork of point solutions stitched together by APIs and third-party implementers." This flexibility, however, came at a steep price. "The customer inherits the confusion," she says. "Implementation becomes a translation project, and integration partners become essential—not because the tools are powerful, but because the architecture is incoherent." It’s a fragile system held together by duct tape, revealing the industry’s deep underinvestment in one thing: real governance.
Not dead, just difficult: "There’s this sentiment I keep hearing—from influencers and disillusioned enterprise vets—that governance is dead," she says. But Haskell doesn't buy it. "Governance isn't dead, it's just really hard. And many organizations haven't invested in doing it well because it's easier just to buy a tool." But tools can’t do the real work. "Governance lives on the people side of the ledger. It’s messy—debates, decisions, arguments, alignment. No tool can shortcut that."
FOMO and familiarity: AI is only raising the stakes. "Psychologically, we crave certainty, especially in unfamiliar environments. And AI is deeply unfamiliar, which amps the anxiety and triggers FOMO," Haskell says. The result, she notes, is often performative action rather than genuine progress. The result? "What looks like discipline is often just performance—an attempt to soothe organizational discomfort, not build real coherence."
The race to trust: For Haskell, trust isn’t something you can fast-track. "It doesn’t scale through acquisition. It’s earned through alignment, transparency, and operational discipline," she says, pointing to Microsoft’s years-long effort to unify its acquired Office apps as a rare example of coherence done right.
"The speed of traffic isn’t always the right speed," she warns. "AI has no conscience, no context—we don’t need to let it set the pace." Her advice: slow down, lead with alignment, and build in space for reflection. That’s how organizations avoid the "values drift" that comes from chasing hype over coherence.
