Oct 12, 2023
Aditya
Gaur
The Current State of Play
The number of software tools and products enterprises use is on the rise. On average, an enterprise invests in and uses 473 SaaS products in its technical and business software stack. This might be surprising as it is a strict departure from what each software has been designed to do—reduce friction. With each software added to the enterprise's stack, its management, workflows, maintenance, access control, governance and compliance, implementation, pricing, and usage become exponentially tricky.
This leads to several business-critical issues:
The lack of effective management and productivity losses
Financial losses due to consistently low utilization
Productivity losses due to usage switching
Creation of ungoverned data siloes
Increased technical barriers
Enterprise Problems
The Lack of Effective Management
Zylo, a SaaS management platform that manages over 30 million SaaS licenses for its customers, reports in its 2023 SaaS Management Index report that, on average, 6.2 new apps are added every 30 days. Most often, many of these tools are ungoverned and unmanaged by IT teams, creating huge problems such as data privacy and user security for the whole company. Managing these tools has become increasingly complex with the rise in shadow IT in enterprises.
Enterprises find it challenging to implement strategies to improve management and supervise their employees' use of various apps. Increased access to tools and services is not the only factor contributing to ill management; inadequate guidelines and best practices also contribute.
Productivity Losses
Every new software brought into a team leads to added time invested in learning, using, and managing that product in the context of the group or the whole company. Buying a software license is the only significant spend for a company. Still, the closely following second most crucial investment and a more impactful one is the time and resources the team or company has to invest in ensuring their teams have the aptitude to use it.
And every second a team member invests in learning a new tool is a second they're not doing their primary job —leading to productivity losses for the whole company. Let's take a look at these statistics from Productiv's State of SaaS 2023 report and derive some critical inferences:
Engineering Teams mainly contribute to the increased need for more tools to enhance their workflows and efficiently make sense of their objectives. But how can this be achieved when that team uses 108 software products on average? This can lead to specific problems such as portability and collaboration and unnecessary friction in managing critical software development and maintenance activities.
On average, IT and security teams grew their tech stack by the highest percentage. This is a cause for concern, as a significant increase in security tools is not a good sign for individual security products. Still, it also shows the enterprises' dedication to becoming more secure.
Be it the total number of apps or a high number of apps that don't work together, productivity and efficiency losses are severe drawbacks of increased applications and lack of connectivity among them.
It's about time enterprises start moving away from ClickOps and towards a holistic automation approach that brings together decision-makers across teams or departments, making the automation journey worthwhile. Mindflow has been built around collaboration for automation. This becomes essential in a world entire of tools that never work together, leading to silos within the enterprise and sometimes within a single team.
Financial Losses
The core objective for technical and business leaders is to ensure they provide every possible opportunity for their team members to succeed. This usually means getting the best-in-class (often the shiniest) tools. This leads to an overcrowding of software products that a limited subset of people are proficient in —there's always harm in picking up the "best-looking" thing and then having everyone adapt their way around it. As stated in the Productiv mentioned above, the primary financial losses are about $9,643 per employee annually. Now, that's a heavy sum to pay for any enterprise, big or small, even more so when most of these employees struggle with getting the total value out of the product.
Most of these costs are often hidden from decision-makers and lack financial oversight. Companies struggle with tracking SaaS spending due to the ease with which business users can sign up for SaaS tools. The lack of leadership from finance and IT departments has led to losing control over spending, which has led to the rise of Shadow IT.
Technical Barriers and Enterprise Data Siloes
While the performance and cost impact of SaaS and software sprawl can overwhelm companies, the impact of technical resources and lack of accessible information availability can lead to long-term downward headwinds. Every new tool in an individual, a team, or an enterprise's stack needs a place to store its data. There is a high chance that this place would be a specialized reservoir for this and only this tool. Have you set up your email provider using your server? Is it possible? Of course. Is it easy? Not in the farthest reality. Email is a rather rudimentary product for today's business world —it has been for a better part of the last three decades.
Imagine setting up your own localized CRM or (let's get crazy) your threat intelligence platform. You would likely spend months setting it up. The problem is not the ability to set up local instances but rather the local accessibility of information and data across all tools and premises (different clouds, on-premises, hybrid, etc.). This is the biggest problem enterprises are facing—a lack of data discovery and accessibility.
This lack of data synchronization across various systems and applications inhibits the pace teams can build and innovate. This is because not all involved teams and departments know what's happening at the individual level and vice versa.
The complexity of connecting increasingly competent tools from multiple vendors has never been more critical to address. And this lack of connectivity is the driving force behind siloed organizations. Data silos prevent effective information sharing and collaboration, negatively impacting decision-making and operational efficiency.
Automation: The Impending Resolution
Automation can be the most straightforward answer to most enterprise problems discussed above. Automation can help move beyond the need for core technical expertise by assisting teams in focusing on orchestrating complex workflows across various tools and platforms. Most importantly, automation has the potential to break down data silos, facilitating seamless data flow and sharing across departments.
Mindflow's ability to seamlessly integrate with cybersecurity, IT, cloud, and other business-critical tools can significantly reduce the technical barriers often encountered when connecting systems that weren't previously interoperable.
Furthermore, for teams lacking advanced technical skills, Mindflow's no-code approach and AI workflow ideation, creation, and optimization features can reduce the technical hurdles that can stifle automation and orchestration initiatives.
Mindflow is the next-gen automation engine with an intuitive UI and an endless integration library. If you can't find the product you're looking for, we'll build it for you in less than a week.
