The world has now transitioned into an era where operational efficiencies are dependent on the latest Information Technology solutions. According to a report published by IDC, the investment in the period between 2022-24 is predicted to be to the tune of $6.3 trillion, underscoring the fact that establishments have begun to adopt a good number of technological tools and solutions to help boost efficiencies and achieve higher goals. That said, digital transformation and the boom in technological infrastructure have led to inundation in the IT toolboxes in organizations. This works to create more chaos than needed; it is important to address this tool excess and cut through the noise to really benefit from IT solutions.
Let’s see how that can be done by learning in detail what tool sprawl is, how it can be managed, and the challenges organizations usually face with it.
What is Tool Sprawl?
With such a plethora of choices and options available in the IT market for streamlining every business process possible, it becomes quite tempting for organizations to get their hands on most of them. Whether it be a Customer Relationship Management Tool or an accountancy software, somewhere down the line, a business ends up accumulating a whole tide of IT tools with little idea of how to utilize them optimally. It ultimately leads to increased expenses in maintaining these software solutions while being unable to generate a good return on investment. This is where the equations fall apart; tool sprawl – another name for possessing IT tools and solutions in excess that doesn’t help the organization deliver efficiently or generate good ROI – is a real problem.
The digital drive of late and the accelerated adoption of technologies has had companies rushing to the IT market and getting their hands on a lot of solutions that make little sense for their business models. Essential questions like cost economy, utility, number of tools and their scope, quality of insights, etc., all get lost on the way.
For example, a business often works with multiple Cloud environments, manages many vendors at the same given time, has ample infrastructure to monitor and maintain. And in order to handle all of this, more and more software, apps, and tools get added into the mix. Unified solutions like a robust cloud load balancer that works with multiple cloud providers, a unified infrastructure monitoring system that tracks all environments in one place, are needed that prevents such overspill of redundant capabilities and combines them into one comprehensive implementation.
In order to build a good IT infrastructure portfolio, it is important to understand your business through and through and select the right tools from the get-go. This is the first step to stop the adoption of information technologies from spinning out of control – to stop Tool Sprawl. Let’s see how companies can effectively manage tool sprawl.
Managing Tool Sprawl
Tool sprawl seems impossible to avoid when innovators and developers keep coming up with shiny new software with improved functionalities, broader scopes, and artificially intelligent algorithms of late. However, it is important to harden the policies around the adoption of new IT solutions and go through a step-by-step process to help take better decisions. Let’s go through these steps one by one.
Thorough Assessments
While it is true that each quarter sees new augmentations to IT software and toolboxes, it isn’t necessary that your business has a definitive use for those functionalities. Assessing the needs of your organization comes first, and spending comes next. It is imperative to understand the limitations of your current tools, the goals your company needs to achieve, and the shortfalls that need to be addressed before a new IT tool is added to your arsenal.
One way your business can go about this is by conducting regular, frequent needs-analyses of the IT sector in the context of soft and hard infrastructure. A few key factors to consider when running this assessment are:
- How vital is the new IT solution to the company?
- Does it address the limitations of the previous tool?
- How helpful is it going to be for the achievement of goals?
- Can the tool be scaled up or down based on needs?
- Is there a functionality overlap with incumbents?
The answers to these questions provide a good base to take decisions on. Naturally, considering how many employees are remote in the current workforce, having a quality webinar software to help facilitate and manage staff meetings is a good idea to invest in.
Addressing of Limitations
Infrastructure isn’t an absolute entity. When planned properly, it can be scaled, tweaked, adjusted, or modified to suit the current needs. With that said, with the latest digital transformation wave, the world grappled with inadequacies both in soft and hard infrastructural setup for IT. Be it Cloud, computer hardware, server utilization, or even the Internet – for a time, it seemed that no infrastructure was capable enough to support the surge in IT tools/solutions and the user inundation during pandemic lockdowns.
Prevention of Interferences, Interruptions, Impositions
Sometimes, IT tools can be heavyweight. Holistic solutions like CRMs often require a good chunk of network bandwidth to function properly, since these consoles are always-on, always-connected. In such situations, it leaves little bandwidth for other solutions to run properly on. Ensure that your IT team assesses the network capability before settling on a solution. If need be, before getting another new tool into the family, augment your network with the necessary hardware and bandwidth to be able to handle the new solution.
Adoption of Cross-Platform Software
Cross-platform software provides a unified platform for accessing IT tools across a plethora of devices, eliminating the need to have dedicated tools to carry out the same functions across phones, laptops, tablets, and consoles. The user experience and data remain the same across all devices. One popular example is Middleware’s Cloud Load Balancer which is compatible with multiple cloud environments. A single tool to manage load balancing across all the Clouds that your company operates on eliminates the necessity for more tools to perform this action.
Challenges Posed by Tool Sprawl
Tool sprawl not only results in wasted resources but poses many other challenges to a company as well in various forms, that then need to be addressed separately. Let’s see what they are.
- Productivity challenge – Scattering the real estate of an employee’s digital space with IT tools only works to confuse them at work, and results in disengagement more often than not. It is a hard task to get back on track after being distracted – this loss of productivity is a major tool sprawl challenge
- Unification/Segregation challenge – Using too many tools may create a disconnect between teams, or may not provide enough segregation for there to be meaningful progress in a project. Especially for professionals engaged in cross-departmental duties, it becomes a matter of juggling the tools to achieve some level of synergy, which is ridiculous
- Consumer challenge – More often than not, the existence of too many tools creates problems for a company to cater to its consumers and improve its brand experiences. Expending unnecessary resources into tool sprawls takes away from building a quality customer journey, which ultimately reflects badly on a brand
EndNote
Tool Sprawl is a slow-burn problem that doesn’t show up overnight. Active practice and diligence need to be displayed in the adoption of new IT infrastructure in order to ensure that inundation does not occur. Following the three-step checks detailed above helps a great deal in avoiding tool sprawl.