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2026-02-10
Wiebe van Leeuwen
As your organization grows, your IT landscape grows with it. That makes sense. You add a planning system, time tracking, a CRM, something for invoicing. Each system has its own function, its own strength, and its own promise. But in practice, keeping everything up to date takes more and more time, even though that extra software was intended to save time in the first place.
You especially see this in organizations that have been around for a while. Companies that have been on the market for years didn't design their IT all at once. Systems were added over time, often with the best intentions. But before you know it, you're working with a landscape where IT no longer works for you, but you work for IT.
Complexity arises as soon as systems do not work together logically. Employees then have to copy data from system A to system B. Or Excel sheets are used as an emergency workaround 'for the overview.' Version control gets lost. Multiple versions of the truth emerge side by side. And suddenly, more time is spent on administration than on the actual work.
More and more software is being used, yet productivity declines. Employees become frustrated, reporting takes more effort, and grip on processes disappears.
This frustration rarely stems from the technology itself, but from choices in setup and logic. Systems are not designed from the user's perspective.
You see this everywhere. An ATM that first asks which banknotes you want, only to then report that it doesn't have them. A parking meter where inserting one wrong coin immediately returns everything, forcing you to start all over again.
These are not technically complex systems, but they are poorly designed from a user perspective. And that is exactly what you see happening within organizations as well.
We can clear up one misunderstanding right away: having multiple systems is often inevitable. One system is simply better at planning, another at time tracking, and yet another at invoicing. If you try to squeeze everything into one tool, you often end up with a solution that can do a bit of everything, but nothing really well.
The problem only arises when these systems operate in isolation. Then someone has to manually transfer hours to invoicing, or check if the correct rates were used. That is error-prone, demotivating, and completely unscalable as your organization grows.
Multiple systems make sense. Poor collaboration does not.
What is often underestimated is how much structural waste this creates. Time lost to copying and checking. Employees doing double work. Frustration because systems aren't cooperating. Compliance becoming more complicated than necessary.
Excel then becomes the glue between systems. Useful for calculations, but disastrous as a central data source. It leads to poor version control and discussions about which list is correct. And that is exactly what you don't want in a growing organization.
Good IT isn't about having as much functionality as possible. It's about simplicity of use. Systems can be complex on the back end, as long as the experience for the user is logical and clear.
When systems work well together, you see an immediate difference in practice. A single source of truth is established. Data is always up to date. Repetitive tasks disappear. Employees have time left to improve processes instead of fixing them.
This doesn't just result in time savings, but also in more job satisfaction. People don't want to spend hours on administration. They want to contribute, improve, and move things forward. IT should facilitate that, not block it.
For managers, this means more insight, better reporting, and better decisions. Not by building in extra checks, but by making data automatically available.
Every new tool triggers resistance. 'Not another system.' 'That probably won't work either.' That reaction is understandable, especially if people have had bad experiences in the past.
But poor tooling structurally costs more time, money, and energy than a well-implemented solution ever will. The question, therefore, is not whether you will encounter resistance, but whether you continue to accept that systems are slowing down your organization.
The core is simple: multiple systems are not the problem. Real complexity arises when they do not work together logically.
Those who want to stay in control would do well not to look for yet another tool, but to look critically at how processes connect, where data should be recorded once, and where manual work is still required. Then IT will once again do what it was meant for: moving your organization forward.
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