Ambitious organisations tend to share a common technology journey as operations scale.
The early days felt exhilarating as a slick website, a new CRM, and a financial system catapulted progress.
But over time, as new departments and workflows emerge, the technology landscape expands haphazardly without centralised governance. Before long, this unchecked sprawl leads to:
✘ IT decisions happen reactively without long-term strategic guidance
✘ Business processes get built around rigid mismatched systems rather than for efficiency
✘ Valuable data gets trapped in departmental silos rather than shared for organisation-wide insights
✘ Data integrity drops as there is usually the need to enter the same data into different silos
The result? Operations reach a ceiling unable to adapt at the pace needed to stay competitive. Technology goes from accelerator to anchor and in some cases, can halt growth and even sometimes operations altogether.
But by taking an IT consolidation approach guided by strategic principles, you can break from haphazard application accumulation to architected alignment that liberates teams.Here is a 3-step template to guide IT consolidation and strategic planning:
Step 1 – Consolidate Business Systems
Inventory all technologies across the company. Identify opportunities to retire redundant solutions and consolidate systems around 1-2 market-leading platforms per function. This eliminates needless overhead and fragmentation and strengthens your core foundation.
Step 2 - Integrate Data and Processes
With fewer core systems, integrated workflows enable seamless movement and visibility of data. API integrations (Perhaps with Zapier if there aren’t native connectors) connect platforms while migration consolidates silo databases into centralised data warehouses.
Step 3 – Plot an Aligned Roadmap
Construct a multi-year strategic technology roadmap oriented around business goals and key dependencies.
This roadmap becomes the blueprint guiding all IT decisions and investments with total transparency on how funding fuels overarching objectives.
With CIO-level guidance, consolidation and strategic alignment remove the disorder choking company-wide innovation.
The outcome? A flexible foundation supports rapid adaption to any opportunity or challenge on the horizon instead of just trying to manage the status quo.
Are fragmented systems and data constraining your company’s potential? Let’s connect!