The carpenter rarely buys a new hammer, and neither should your IT Team

The rise of tool sprawl

Often, organisations constantly add new software tools to solve very similar problems. In IT jargon, this is known as “tool sprawl”.

It’s a common occurrence, with 6 in 10 IT leaders reporting that their organisation adds new SaaS tools every month. Azure alone now lists over 300 products in its ecosystem. Plus, with AI enabling “vibe coding” of micro-apps with little experience required, the explosion of available tools shows no sign of slowing.

Why tool sprawl hurts organisations

Imagine asking a carpenter to build a cabinet using a completely different set of tools every week. They would spend more time learning the new tools than actually building anything. This is exactly what happens in many IT teams and the consequences are significant…

• Lost expertise: It’s impossible for teams to build deep experience across an ever-expanding toolset. Most teams use only a fraction of what any given tool can do.
• Fragility: Systems become brittle when integrations break as tools change, or when tools stop working as environments evolve.
• Security risks: Every additional tool expands the attack surface and teams with less experience with them aren’t equipped to manage risks.
• Wasted cost: If teams locally purchase technology to solve problems, then organisations quickly end up paying for overlapping tools that address the same issue.

How do you choose the right tool?

How do you stop tool sprawl and decide the right tools to master? Well, you need a common and consistent set that allow teams to build deep expertise. They need to be fully agnostic. They need to be able to work on-prem, as well as in a fully distributed, multi-cloud environment.  They need a wide range of inputs and outputs, and, critically, a licencing structure that doesn’t throw in prohibitive cost hurdles as soon as new use cases are commissioned.

Having access to this kind of Evolutionary Technology, a consistent and reliable capability that works across today’s messy reality, lets you work like a master carpenter.

Clear out your workshop

When you face a new organisational challenge, the goal isn’t to build yourself a bigger IT workshop. Surely the goal is to build even deeper expertise in the few tools that actually help you fix it.