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Summary – Accumulating specialized tools creates heterogeneous interfaces, cognitive fatigue, redundant license costs and technical debt that slow decision-making and innovation. By mapping real processes, prioritizing business use cases and migrating to a modular architecture with microservices and unified APIs under a single portal with automated integration and agile governance, you achieve coherence, simplified maintenance and rapid adoption. Solution: diagnose your friction points, consolidate your application portfolio and deploy a composable information system to empower your teams and maximize ROI.
In many Swiss organizations, the accumulation of specialized tools often seems to be the answer to every operational need or management requirement. For a CIO or CTO, this typically translates into a highly technical mindset: adding a software solution for every process or metric.
Yet, on the ground, operational teams endure these heterogeneous, repetitive, and fragmented interfaces at the expense of their productivity. It’s time to adopt an approach focused on actual usage, rationalize your tools, and rethink the overall ecosystem. By simplifying without sacrificing control, you can ensure adoption, data consistency, and a sustainable return on investment—perfectly aligned with the expectations of the Swiss market.
Assessing the Impact of Software Proliferation on Your Information System
The stacking of business applications creates friction and diffuses accountability. This initial assessment is essential to measure the real impacts on productivity and costs.
Impact on Team Productivity
Each new tool demands training, additional credentials, and often a different data context. Employees spend considerable time switching between applications, duplicating data entry, or searching for where to find specific information.
This fragmentation leads to cognitive fatigue, slows decision-making processes, and sometimes results in input errors. Product or sales teams may end up concealing these dysfunctions rather than reporting them, which undermines reporting quality and reliable management.
Increased IT Department Complexity
Beyond the user experience, integrating multiple software solutions places a significant maintenance burden on the IT department. Updates, compatibility tests, and security patches multiply. For insights on securing your cloud ERP, consult our guide.
Downtime accumulates with every version upgrade, and dependency management becomes time-consuming. In the medium term, this can hinder the IT department’s ability to roll out new projects, as a large portion of the budget is absorbed by operational maintenance.
Technical debt grows without immediate visible effects—until a critical incident exposes the excessive interdependencies between systems, making recovery long and complex.
Hidden Costs and Underutilized Licenses
Cumulative licenses, SaaS subscriptions, and support fees often vary by department, obscuring the overall budget allocated to the information system. Functional redundancies go unnoticed without a periodic review process.
In some companies, up to 30% of licenses remain completely unused, while other purchased modules no longer match everyday needs. The absence of unified reporting prevents informed decisions regarding the relevance of each license.
Example: A digital services company maintained five CRM solutions across different divisions. Each was underutilized and required a dedicated maintenance contract. After a simple audit, the IT department decommissioned two redundant licenses, immediately saving 20% of the annual budget while improving the consistency of customer data.
The takeaway for the IT department is clear: every underutilized license represents a fixed cost that does not translate into on-the-ground performance gains. Without precise measurement, it remains difficult to justify either removal or consolidation of tools deemed indispensable. For improved technical debt management, consult our guide on technical debt control.
Refocusing the Information System on Business Usage
An approach centered on actual processes ensures that each tool delivers tangible value. It starts by identifying operational needs before selecting or retaining any software.
Mapping Critical Processes
The first step is to map information flows and key stages of each activity. This goes beyond listing software—it identifies bottlenecks or slow points in daily processes.
Mapping requires collaboration between the IT department, business units, and field teams. It should reveal redundancies, manual steps, and overly complex interfaces that slow execution. To learn more about workflow architecture, read our article.
This shared diagnosis forms the foundation for any rationalization effort and allows you to quantify each tool’s real impact on business performance by evaluating and selecting solutions tailored to your processes.
Prioritizing Real Needs
Once processes are documented, improvements must be ranked by their contribution to revenue, customer satisfaction, or risk reduction. This prioritization should incorporate user feedback, often overlooked in software decisions.
Advanced features are sometimes underused because they don’t align with everyday practices or are too burdensome to configure. It’s better to focus on high-value modules than to accumulate new licenses.
Iterative management of these priorities avoids monolithic projects and ensures a tangible return on investment at each phase.
Adapting the Ecosystem to Actual Usage
Rather than imposing a generic software solution across all functions, consider modular or custom solutions tailored to specific contexts. This may involve light development work or fine-tuning open source platforms.
This flexibility limits the number of tools while providing a unified user experience. Interfaces can be consolidated through portals or standardized APIs to mask underlying complexity.
Example: An industrial firm used five separate portals for production order management, maintenance tracking, quality control, procurement, and reporting. By migrating to a composable platform and developing custom microservices, the company reduced its software portfolio by 40% and improved the speed of critical data processing.
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Establishing a Coherent and Scalable Software Architecture
A modular, composable architecture ensures flexibility and longevity of your information system. It simplifies integration, scalability, and ongoing maintenance.
Choosing Modular Platforms
Modular solutions rely on independent building blocks (microservices, functional modules, APIs) that can be activated or deactivated as needed. This approach limits the impact of changes on the entire system.
By prioritizing open source platforms, you retain control over your source code and avoid vendor lock-in. You can customize modules without being constrained by closed licenses or prohibitive migration costs. For a scalable software architecture, explore our guide.
Composable Architecture and Microservices
Composable architecture involves assembling services and features at a granular level. Each microservice handles a specific functional domain (authentication, inventory management, billing, etc.) and interfaces through lightweight APIs.
This granularity simplifies testing, deployment automation, and monitoring. In the event of an incident, one service can be isolated without affecting the whole system, reducing the risk of a widespread outage.
Prudent decomposition also limits cognitive complexity and promotes clear responsibility boundaries among engineering teams.
Integration and Data Flow Automation
Once components are defined, you must orchestrate data flows to ensure information consistency. Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs) or integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) solutions facilitate this integration. For total automation, read our article on designing processes to be automated from the start.
Automation relies on CI/CD pipelines to deploy, test, and monitor each version. Continuous end-to-end testing ensures the stability of business flows.
This DevOps approach strengthens collaboration between IT and business teams, accelerates deployments, and enhances system resilience in the face of change.
Implementing Agile Governance and Streamlined Management
Governance must reflect actual usage dynamics and evolve with business priorities. Clear management enables performance measurement and continuous refinement of the software portfolio.
Managing Applications Through Catalogs and Metrics
A centralized catalog lists each application, its usage, cost, and user satisfaction level. It becomes the reference tool for purchase or decommissioning decisions.
The right KPIs to steer your information system in real time (adoption rate, time spent, functional ROI) are tracked regularly. These data-driven insights, including OKRs, facilitate trade-offs and justify system changes to senior management.
Iterative, Cross-Functional Governance
Instead of IT steering committees every six months, it’s better to hold quick, regular reviews that include the IT department, business representatives, and architects. These sessions allow you to reassess priorities and align them with strategic objectives. To learn how to effectively scope an IT project, consult our guide.
Ongoing Training and Adoption
Tool implementation doesn’t end at go-live. Training must be continuous, context-specific, and integrated into teams’ daily routines.
Short sessions focused on real use cases, combined with accessible documentation, boost adoption and reduce resistance to change. Feedback is collected to fine-tune configurations and processes.
This continuous improvement loop ensures chosen software remains aligned with usage and truly meets business needs.
Simplify Your Information System to Unlock Operational Efficiency
Software proliferation is not inevitable. By accurately diagnosing friction, refocusing your system on usage, adopting a modular architecture, and implementing agile governance, you can rationalize your application portfolio while strengthening oversight.
Simplicity—combined with clear process understanding and relevant metrics—becomes a lever for lasting performance. Your teams gain productivity, your IT department frees up resources for innovation, and your information system fully supports your strategic goals.
Our Edana experts are available to guide you through this pragmatic, context-driven process, leveraging open source, scalability, and security without vendor lock-in—always ROI-focused.
