Assessing Your Technical Debt

Teams avoid certain tools you're paying for. Staff bypasses official tools, preferring manual workarounds or shadow systems. New hires face tool overload onboarding. Training on a dozen-plus systems takes weeks before real work begins. Long-unused licenses. Paid platforms sit idle for months while subscriptions auto-renew. Frequent confusion over which tool to use. Overlapping apps leave people unsure where to collaborate or document. More time training than doing. Tool training feels like a job in itself instead of enabling work.

Data lives in too many places and doesn't match. Metrics disagree across systems because there is no single source of truth. Reporting requires manual patchwork. Teams export data from multiple tools and stitch it together by hand. We need to integrate X and Y, but it never happens. Integrations stay deferred for months and data remains siloed. Duplicate data entry and swivel-chair work. People copy the same information into multiple systems every day. Broken integrations go unnoticed. Syncs fail silently and are discovered days or weeks later.

Lack of centralized visibility on spend. Subscriptions are scattered across departments and credit cards. We'll grow into it justification fell flat. After 12+ months, only a small fraction of the platform is used. Paying for unused seats or accounts. Licenses for inactive users quietly drain budget. Unclear ROI for each tool. You cannot explain the concrete value of certain applications. Sticking with sunk costs. Keeping a tool just because the contract was already paid.

Different teams, different tools for the same job. Teams buy separate solutions for identical needs without a strategy. Reactive tool purchases with no strategy. Tools are acquired to solve urgent problems without planning. Leadership lacks visibility into operations. Executives need manual reports to understand performance. Shadow IT and rogue tool use. Employees adopt unapproved tools that create risk and fragmentation. Access and ownership crises. No one is sure who owns key admin credentials after departures.

Underutilized feature bloat. Less than 30% of a platform is actually used. Enterprise-grade overkill. An overly complex system is far beyond current needs. Multiple tools for the same purpose. Three or more overlapping tools cover the same workflows. Constant workarounds or custom glue. Scripts and add-ons are required just to run basic workflows. Integration add-ons to connect silos. Extra platforms are purchased to bridge tools that do not connect.