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Summary – Daily workarounds (manual re-entries, ad hoc scripts, one-off apps) fragment the IT system, drive up hidden costs, and undermine reliability and compliance. This complexity spiral shows up as duplicated data, fragile interfaces, and technical debt that stifles innovation without clear governance.
Solution: collaborative scoping to define a shared vision, a recurring architecture committee, and adoption of modular building blocks and standardized APIs to restore agility and resilience.
In most organizations, an IT architecture does not collapse overnight: it gradually unravels under the effect of local decisions and emergency fixes. The first signs appear as workarounds and patchwork solutions that, taken in isolation, seem effective, but whose accumulation undermines the system’s resilience.
Ignoring these weak signals means turning every new trade-off into an additional complexity factor until the infrastructure becomes a hindrance. This silent drift hampers agility, inflates hidden costs, and makes every change risky. It is therefore crucial to detect and interpret these alerts before they demand a heavy and costly overhaul.
The Initial Weak Signals of a Derailing Architecture
The first alerts are not major failures, but recurring operational frictions. These local compromises foreshadow a long-term loss of overall coherence.
Frequent Manual Re-entries
When IT teams spend time manually re-entering data, it often indicates that flows between applications are neither automated nor reliable. Each duplicate entry raises the risk of errors and creates delays in information availability for business managers. The cost of these tasks disappears into timesheets, masking a constant workload that could be avoided. Over time, this process erodes users’ trust in the information system.
These re-entries are often treated as a mere footnote in daily operations until a major incident occurs. Correction delays and the time spent consolidating data eventually eat into resources allocated to innovation. Without tracking these tasks, assessing their true impact on the overall performance of the IS becomes impossible. It then becomes hard to convince the executive team to prioritize the work needed to secure data exchanges.
The proliferation of Excel sheets or ad hoc reports to work around these gaps illustrates the same issue: an extra layer is created instead of fixing the root cause. This workaround strategy ends up weighing down the ecosystem and scattering responsibility for data quality. The organization thus ends up with an information system whose foundations gradually crumble, without any major alert being triggered in time.
Ad Hoc Interfaces and Home-grown “Glues”
Quick-and-dirty interfaces built to connect two applications often seem like a fast short-term solution. They are developed with insufficient documentation and rely on fragile scripts, lacking a shared overall vision. The slightest change in one component can break these junctions, causing service outages or cascading effects that are hard to diagnose. These makeshift “glues” are a constant source of incident tickets.
Maintaining these interfaces is time-consuming, especially when there is no automation or unit tests. Every update of a third-party system becomes a risky bet, as the impact on all connections is unpredictable. Teams then devote an increasing share of their time to ensure compatibility, at the expense of higher-value innovation projects. The hidden costs of this informal support eventually exceed the initial savings.
In the long term, these unmanaged glues lock the organization into a cycle of dependence on the few developers familiar with the scripts. Their departure or unavailability can paralyze key processes. This situation highlights the lack of architectural governance and underscores the urgency of establishing design standards and quality references for all interfaces.
Proliferation of Point Solutions
To meet each immediate business need, teams often adopt specialized tools without ensuring their harmonious integration into the IS. These point solutions solve a local problem, but do not contribute to an overarching strategy. Soon, you see ten applications each handling a narrow scope, with no common foundation to guarantee coherence and interoperability.
An illustrative example: a Swiss logistics company had deployed four different tools for delivery tracking, each purchased under pressure from a single department. This fragmentation led to duplicated customer data and weekly routing errors, causing a 15% increase in complaints. This case shows how the proliferation of functional niches degrades the user experience and generates seemingly invisible consolidation costs.
The multiplication of point solutions also dilutes IT management’s visibility over the entire application portfolio. Tool portfolios become inextricable, making it nearly impossible to prioritize evolutions. At this stage, the architecture already begins to hamper productivity rather than accelerate it.
The Escalation of Complexity and Its Consequences
As the IS grows, initial inconsistencies turn into major obstacles. Application and data duplication amplifies hidden costs and weakens future developments.
Redundant Applications and Internal Competition
When multiple teams independently choose solutions for the same need, the architecture fragments. Billing or inventory modules coexist in two different environments, without coordination between teams. This redundancy creates confusion: business metrics are no longer unique, and every strategic decision relies on divergent databases.
Maintaining these competing applications means duplicating efforts on patches, updates, and user access. The IT budget is quickly saturated by simple synchronization tasks, and every new feature must be deployed twice instead of once. Teams spend more time aligning environments than innovating.
In a highly regulated Swiss environment, this lack of coherence can also generate compliance gaps between organizational units. Audits become a real headache, with each application required to justify its security and confidentiality procedures separately. The architecture, meant to be an efficiency driver, becomes an operational and financial brake.
Duplicated Data and Consolidation Effort
Data duplication often stems from re-entry processes or reliance on flat files to bypass interfaces. Each information silo builds its own repository, with no synchronization or version control. The result is discrepancies, update delays, and a heightened risk of errors in strategic reports.
For example, a Swiss public agency discovered a 20% discrepancy between its CRM and ERP customer data. This gap revealed the absence of a data governance plan and jeopardized the reliability of statistics used to guide investments. This case demonstrates the direct impact of duplicates on decision-making and trust in analytical tools.
As a result, teams spend considerable time on manual consolidation tasks, while these resources could be allocated to higher-value projects. The synchronization effort introduces a structural delay in the production cycle of indicators, limiting the organization’s agility in response to market demands.
“Elegant” Integrations Masking Complexity
Integrations designed to appear simple can hide asynchronous data exchanges, complex transformation scripts, and poorly documented fallback points. This concealment complicates bottleneck detection and renders incident management ineffective. Diagnostic times lengthen, and every minor change in one service can trigger unpredictable side effects.
The lack of traceability and automated tests on these workflows leads to intermittent, hard-to-anticipate blockages. Performance issues turn usual deployments into high-risk operations, requiring extended maintenance windows. End users then face constant uncertainty about service availability.
Gradually, technical debt accumulates in the form of unmaintained scripts and business logic embedded in obscure pipelines. The organization gains complexity at the expense of transparency, and any change demands a painstaking inventory to understand dependencies. The architecture becomes impervious to rapid change.
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Organizational and Strategic Drifts
Beyond technology, governance and strategy slip gradually out of the company’s control. Institutionalized workarounds and dependency on obsolescence reflect a loss of control.
Workarounds That Become the Norm
When a makeshift solution is accepted as an official procedure, the organization loses the ability to distinguish exceptions from standards. Excel files fill the gaps of a missing API and become the daily basis for financial reports. This normalization of workarounds embeds a drift reflex rather than a sustainable fix.
For example, a private clinic in Switzerland had used shared spreadsheets for medical resource allocation for years. With no centralized software, each department updated its schedules manually, causing scheduling conflicts and missed appointments. This case shows how an informal tool substitutes a structured solution, to the detriment of service quality and traceability.
The entrenchment of these practices hinders any rationalization initiative: users coordinate outside the IS and fear that removing their “trusted Excel” will impede their operations. The organizational challenge thus becomes more cultural than technical, requiring a cross-functional change management to restore a common discipline.
Dependence on Obsolete Technologies
Delays in updates and fear of regressions keep the infrastructure on outdated versions, whose security patches are no longer guaranteed. This dependence weakens the cybersecurity posture and penalizes the integration of new features. Every migration becomes perilous and demands costly workarounds to maintain compatibility.
In a case in French-speaking Switzerland, a financial department still relied on a deprecated database whose support had ended three years earlier. The IT teams feared migrating to a newer version, concerned about breaking critical flows. This example shows how obsolescence hinders the adoption of modern solutions and strengthens technical debt.
As obsolescence drags on, the ecosystem becomes more fragile and vulnerable. Potential attacks exploit unpatched vulnerabilities, turning each deprecated component into a security sieve. Technical debt thus doubles as a major operational risk.
Architecture Reports with No Real Impact
Producing detailed architecture documents without translating them into concrete decisions only nurtures sterile formalism. These often voluminous reports struggle to build consensus around clear priorities and remain confined to digital shelves. The absence of feedback loops and tangible action plans quickly renders them obsolete.
A Swiss canton commissioned an architecture study to modernize its IS, but the report was never implemented. The IT management deemed the plan too generic, lacking prioritization aligned with business challenges. This case illustrates how an architectural approach without shared governance leads to a gap between strategy and execution.
These organizational drifts require agile, cross-functional steering, capable of turning vision into an operational roadmap. Without this linkage, strategy remains an intention and architecture a formal exercise far removed from real-world constraints.
Rebuilding a Healthy Architectural Trajectory
Spotting these weak signals in time is an opportunity to restart on coherent foundations. A pragmatic approach can reduce technical debt and restore IS agility.
Redefine an Overall Vision
The first step is to gather business and IT stakeholders around a shared set of objectives. This involves mapping the current state, identifying breaking points, and establishing a reference framework aligned with the company’s strategy. This shared vision becomes the common thread for all future decisions.
A Swiss tech SME held a scoping workshop with the CIO, business leaders, and external architects. After two days of collaborative work, the roadmap was reduced by 40%, keeping only high-impact initiatives. This example demonstrates how a clarified vision effectively guides architectural priorities.
Without this dialogue, initiatives multiply without coherence and reinforce functional silos. A global governance approach avoids redundancies and ensures every technical choice serves a clearly defined business goal, thus eliminating the pitfalls identified earlier.
Prioritize Architectural Governance
Establishing a recurring architecture committee enables systematic evaluation of new needs and trade-off decisions. This body ensures the coherence of technology choices, security, modularity, and, whenever possible, open source. It serves as a safeguard against local drifts.
Decisions are recorded in an evolving repository, accessible to all. Every project proposal is reviewed through this process, reducing the risk of workaround solutions. Architectural governance thus becomes the pillar of a coherent and sustainable trajectory.
A Swiss professional services firm set up monthly architecture reviews involving the CIO and business leaders. This routine eliminated 25% of redundant tools and standardized integrations on a single platform. This case shows the direct impact of active governance on reducing technical debt.
Choose Modular and Evolutive Solutions
Rather than aiming for perfection on paper, the goal is to reduce complexity by favoring micro-services and open-source components. Standardized APIs and scalable platforms provide a robust foundation to support real-world use. Modularity simplifies fault isolation and targeted scaling.
For example, a Swiss industrial company replaced its monolith with a set of specialized services. Each functional domain now has an independent service deployable on its own cadence. This transition cut the average time to production by 30% and simplified daily maintenance.
Adopting this context-driven approach, free from vendor lock-in, guarantees regained agility and measurable ROI. The IS ceases to be a static cost center and becomes an innovation driver.
Turning Weak Signals into a Resilient IT Trajectory
Identifying and understanding the weak signals of a struggling architecture is an act of responsible leadership, not an admission of failure. By taking back control of vision, governance, and modularity, it is possible to reduce complexity and restore the information system’s agility. Each initial compromise can be reframed within a coherent structure to sustainably support performance and growth.
Whether you are a CIO, CTO, or executive, our Edana experts are ready to help you transform these signals into opportunities. We guide you in laying the foundations of a modular, secure, and scalable IS tailored to your context and business challenges.
