The pressure on businesses to digitize has changed how they operate, fueling a growing trend of adopting new technologies to stay competitive and improve efficiencies. However, this drive towards modernization is leading to an overuse of point solutions that are designed to address one specific problem within an organization. The result? Sprawling and disconnected technology stacks across businesses that are draining efficiency and disrupting the flow of work.
In recent years, many teams had two major priorities – enable business in a heavily remote world and drive growth at all costs. And because they had the access to capital needed to buy technology, many adopted a range of incremental technologies to address specific challenges across their departments. Whether it was a new employee time off request tool for HR or a new tax compliance management tool for finance, organizations were constantly bringing in new software and doing so with little regard to existing processes.
Fast forward to today and businesses find themselves in a different position than in recent years. The focus for many is on driving efficiency and enabling people to do their most productive work. But instead of their existing technology working for them, in many cases, it’s draining efficiency even further.
CIO at Nintex.
Software overconsumption and underutilization drain efficiency
Many organizations have the best of intentions when acquiring software – they are adopting it to help do tasks better, faster, and smarter. But challenges arise when organizations have deployed more software than they need, have redundant technologies, haven’t integrated the systems, or aren’t utilizing the software to its full extent.
The beauty of software-as-a-service (SaaS) is that it’s easier for organizations to adopt, implement, and use technologies to solve specific challenges. But it’s also because of those exact same reasons that businesses find themselves in the position they’re in today. Teams have been able to purchase their own software solutions to solve their specific challenges and individual processes. This increases the agility of teams to solve problems with technology, but it also creates disruptions to broader processes and workflows across an organization.
Those implications show up in many forms. Business leaders and teams now have siloed data, unnecessary technology spend, and disrupted processes that prevent people from being efficient and work flowing as it should. IT teams are also burdened by an overwhelming amount of software implementations and added security concerns that come with software adoption without proper governance.
To solve these challenges, many organizations have started looking for ways to consolidate their technologies.
Software consolidation takes center stage
A recent report shows that 72% of CIOs are concerned about the impact of app sprawl, while another found that midsize companies waste an average of £18 million annually on unused software licenses. And according to Canva’s 2024 CIO report, 64% of organizations say they don’t have enough staff to train employees on new technologies. The data is clear – organizations need to consolidate their technology stacks. And that’s exactly what they’re doing to achieve widespread efficiency across departments.
But a successful software consolidation strategy requires more than cutting technology – it must take process into account.
Think about how work flows through an organization. It requires data to move between people and technology. So, if an organization is consolidating its technology stack, it’s important to understand what technology is necessary to keep, ensuring that business processes and workflows move as efficiently as possible.
End-to-end process automation enables organizations to identify where inefficiencies lie in their processes today, including the technology that isn’t working for them. It also allows organizations to apply automation to orchestrate workflows across departments for maximum efficiency. And because disconnected and siloed data is a key driver of software consolidation, process automation enables business leaders to easily build applications that bring optimized workflows and processes to life.
Taking a strategic approach with process in mind can help to uncover overlapping tools, underutilized licenses, and replace point solutions with easy-to-use applications that allow work to flow efficiently and effectively through an organization. By consolidating software with process in mind, organizations can easily adopt new technologies in the future, like AI tools, on top of already optimized workflows. This will make adoption and implementation easier, while also preventing disruption to processes.
If the primary mandate for organizations today is efficiency, then the path to operational excellence starts by empowering your team members by removing friction from work. Reducing the sprawl of software and optimizing processes to connect data between people and systems is a key factor in removing that friction.
Technology can solve your efficiency challenges, if adopted and used with process in mind. Without process, there’s a good chance that technology is a main reason your people and teams are struggling to be productive and efficient.
We've rated the best small business software.
This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro's Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro
