Most teams do not have a software shortage.
They have:
- Two or three CRMs
- Multiple project tools
- Tickets split across email, a helpdesk, and Slack
- Reporting glued together in spreadsheets
Now ask a simple question:
For one customer request in your business, how many apps does it actually touch?
If you do not know, you are almost certainly paying the hidden tax of tool sprawl.
And the data says that the tax you pay is real and devastating:
- Celonis reports that 72 percent of IT leaders say system migration projects take longer than planned and 75 percent of cloud migrations run over budget, reflecting how tangled and complex internal systems have become.
- Gartner warns that poorly planned automation and tooling can damage data usage, business processes, employee morale, and customer satisfaction instead of improving them.
- In recent surveys, around 61 percent of decision makers say they use or are evaluating process mining specifically to simplify operations and untangle complexity.
This post is about how you got here, what it is costing you, and how to start unwinding it.
1. How tool sprawl actually happens
Tool sprawl is not usually the result of one bad decision. It is the result of dozens of reasonable decisions made in isolation.
Local optimization
- Marketing buys a new automation platform.
- Sales buys a specialized CRM add on.
- CX stands up a helpdesk tool that works for them.
- Finance adds another billing or collections system.
Each choice makes local sense. No one is looking at the end to end effect on a customer journey or an internal process.
No clear system of record
- You might have three places where “the customer record” lives.
- HR data lives partly in payroll, partly in a spreadsheet, partly in the HRIS.
- Product data is spread across the ERP, a catalog tool, and a legacy database.
Without deliberate system of record choices per domain, any team can decide “our tool is the truth”.
Mergers, quick fixes, and temporary tools that never died
- A company is acquired and you inherit their stack.
- A new tool was meant to be temporary for a project and quietly became permanent.
- Teams buy tools on a corporate card to move faster and no one ever does a cleanup.
After a few years, you are not running a tech stack. You are running an archeological site.
2. The operational cost of fragmented systems
Tool sprawl is not just an IT annoyance. It shows up in daily operations everywhere.
Conflicting numbers in dashboards
- Sales, finance, and success all have different counts for “active customer”.
- Funnel metrics change depending on which system you pull from.
- Executives spend time arguing about whose report is “right” instead of acting.
Duplicate data entry and swivel chair work
- Staff retype the same information from one system into another.
- People keep local spreadsheets because they do not trust any single tool.
- Small changes require touching three or four apps manually.
This is the opposite of leverage. You are paying skilled people to be human APIs.
Slower onboarding because the map lives in people’s heads
- New hires struggle because the real process is “click here, then go to this other tool, then ask Jane for that export”.
- Documentation is always out of date because tools and flows keep changing piecemeal.
Ramp time goes up, quality goes down.
Higher risk of failed migrations and blown budgets
Celonis’ research on modernization and cloud migration captures the scale of the problem:
- 72 percent of IT leaders say system migration projects take longer than planned.
- 75 percent say their cloud migrations run over budget.
When your environment is full of one-off tools and spaghetti integrations, any big change becomes risky and expensive.
3. Principles for rationalizing your stack
You do not fix tool sprawl by banning new software. You fix it by designing the stack the same way you would design a product.
Define systems of record first, integrations second, point tools third
For each core domain, explicitly decide:
- Customer: which system is the source of truth
- Worker: which system owns employee data
- Product, contract, ticket, asset, etc.
Then:
- Integrations move and synchronize data with clear rules.
- Point tools can live on the edges, but do not get to redefine truth.
Audit tools by usage, value, and data impact
You want more than a license count. For each tool, ask:
- How many people actually use it monthly?
- What can we do here that we cannot do elsewhere?
- Does this tool improve data quality or fragment it?
This is where you will find:
- Tools that are effectively abandoned but still renewed
- Tools doing the same job as something else
- Tools that are critical but poorly integrated
Consolidate categories where you have three tools doing one job
Common examples:
- Multiple project or task tools
- Multiple knowledge bases or wikis
- Multiple survey or form tools
- Multiple chat or ticketing channels
You do not need one tool for everything. You do need fewer tools per job.
Align licensing and roadmap decisions to value streams
Instead of “marketing wants X” and “support wants Y”, anchor decisions in:
- What your top revenue and service journeys need
- Where fragmentation is actively hurting speed, quality, or experience
- Which tools are essential to deliver those journeys well
This moves the conversation from preference to performance.
4. How Systems & Workflow Optimization advisory helps
If you are inside the system, it is hard to see the whole mess and stay neutral. That is where an outside Business Operations partner can help without pushing a specific vendor.
Here is what good Systems & Workflow Optimization support should do for you.
Neutral inventory of current systems across HR/CX/finance/ops
- Catalog tools by function, usage, and owners.
- Map which workflows each tool participates in.
- Surface hidden dependencies and shadow systems.
Recommendations to consolidate and clarify roles, without breaking the day job
- Propose a target architecture with clear systems of record per domain.
- Identify which tools can be consolidated or retired in low risk phases.
- Plan migrations and changes so teams are not constantly disrupted.
The goal is not “rip and replace everything”. The goal is “simplify with intent”.
Design cleaner workflows, so teams use fewer tools to complete one task
- Redesign key workflows so a customer request, ticket, invoice, or hire touches fewer systems.
- Align process changes with system changes so people do not have to invent workarounds.
- Reduce the amount of swivel chair work built into core processes.
When you cut the number of tools a process touches, you cut:
- Friction
- Error paths
- Training burden
And you increase:
- Speed
- Clarity
- Ability to add smart automation or AI later
5. A simple starting move: count the systems in your top workflows
Before you buy your next platform, try this.
Ask your team to pull one simple report:
For our top three workflows (for example, lead to close, order to cash, case to resolution):
- How many distinct systems are touched from start to finish?
- How many times do humans move data between them manually?
If you do not know, that is your first Systems & Workflow Optimization opportunity.
And if the answer is higher than you expected, you do not need another tool.
You need a stack audit, a clear system of record strategy, and simpler workflows that work with your people instead of against them.
