Sometimes, less is more.
Enterprise software company Freshworks released a report last year that tracked software bloat. The company found that IT pros spend an average of almost a full work day each week dealing with bloatware. Over half of its respondents said that their organisations pay for SaaS features that the IT teams never use.
Now, imagine the added burden of all the on-premises applications that your IT team is supporting that are underused. The research also found that IT pros consider their tech stacks too complicated. 'Frankenstacks' that blend solutions from multiple vendors can quickly get difficult to manage. They can also create data silos that make it difficult for companies to unlock all of their data.
The same number of workers who said the tech stack was too complex - 45% - also said that their organisations spent too much money maintaining it.
It isn't just that companies are using too much software. You'll often find companies using multiple applications for the same task, such as recruitment or finance, especially as the size of the organisation increases.
How can we slim down our software portfolios? The obvious answer is to consolidate them, finding applications that overlap, identifying those that are underused or redundant, and marking them for elimination. In reality, less obvious problems - politics and departmental needs - get in the way.
While one department's application might have 90% of the same features as another's, companies might find it hard to replace them. That's because the 10% of features that differ fill that department's unique need. This makes it difficult for IT teams to wrest that product away from the users.
One way to solve this software overlap problem is to think more broadly about each team's processes. Often, the only reason that a process works the way it does is because no one remembers a time when it didn't. As Admiral Grace Hopper, the inventor of COBOL, said in the mid-seventies: "the most dangerous phrase a data processing manager can use is 'We've always done it that way'."
A business process review can highlight areas for improvement that might enable a company to do away with a particular function altogether. Investing that effort might streamline existing tasks and remove the need for a specific application.
Common reusable components
To really address the heart of the problem a consolidation exercise might involve building a common set of underlying components or services that you can then use as the basis to replace other applications over time.
For example, Microsoft's Common Data Model is a shared data language that business applications can use to exchange data between each other. That means you can make data available to applications across Azure. Independent software vendors use it, meaning that you can often tie applications beyond Microsoft's own into a more streamlined portfolio.
Giving people choice
Another tool to find balance between what business managers want and what IT is willing to support is an enterprise software catalogue. This can give line-of-business departments a choice between several applications that offer similar features while putting some control back in IT's hands. Instead of reacting to a departmental manager who buys an unauthorised application behind your back, you can bring them into the fold by offering them apps that will be both supported and paid for by IT, giving them an added incentive to play ball.
Just as when people try to lose weight, the journey to your idea bloat-free software portfolio will take a little while. It's often a process of offering companies alternatives when a software license period nears its end, while gradually replacing heterogeneous software features with a unified underlying set of services and data models.
This software rationalisation process often accompanies cloud migration. Moving workloads to the cloud gives you a chance to review applications and decide whether you want to replace them with another application or refactor them as smaller services.
It might take effort and patience, but a balanced mix of technology options, process reviews, and internal business conversations can turn an unwieldy bucket of costly licenses into a honed and toned collection of targeted features.