Patty Hatter is its President and COO Opera.
As technology organizations continue to modernize and keep pace with changing industry trends and business demands, the number of applications used to support their initiatives has grown steadily with double digit app adoption.
Whether it’s developers using various tools throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC) or business leaders and product owners using collaboration or project management software, tool proliferation can get out of control—and expensive—very quickly. Larger organizations spend thousands of dollars per employee on SaaS applications alone each year.
programmers use different tools from cloud and development platforms to coding and collaboration tools. More often than not, they use different toolsets than their peers. Some larger enterprises may employ thousands of developers, quickly creating a proliferation of out-of-control tools and, especially for highly regulated industries, causing a mess of security issues.
The proliferation of tools doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s understandable how it does when you look at the inner workings of an organization. However, there is a way to successfully manage the proliferation of tools. It’s about balancing the requirements and needs between business leadership and engineering teams, while simplifying the architecture to unify tools and meet everyone’s needs.
Let’s explore the spread of tools, including how to identify them in your organization and the keys to balance.
Understanding the deployment of tools in your organization
First, it is important to understand that tool proliferation is not a niche problem. It happens in many organizations, regardless of size or industry. Everything is an ebb and flow — no one is trying to create chaos, but specific needs must be met, and there is never just one tool that addresses every need or challenge within a company.
The tooling wave typically begins when multiple solutions are adopted to address the real and unique needs of individual teams in an organization, from engineering to IT and everything in between. The extent of the spread of tools is usually noticed when license renewals occur. This can create a real “ah-ha” moment.
This is an opportunity for the business to step back, assess the value of the tools that have been purchased over the last year or two, and understand where duplication has occurred or where tools are not being used. A unified platform is an approach that helps solve multi-point problems in an architecture by simplifying tool management. While it may sound counterintuitive to add another tool to this scenario, automation can help speed up the discovery process. For example, you can connect source code management (SCM) and request monitoring to a DevOps orchestration platform that automatically identifies the tools used in the technology stack.
Culturally, it’s important to work cross-functionally between business and engineering leadership to understand which teams are using which tools, how they’re delivering value, and how satisfied each team is with the tools they’re currently using. Company leadership should drive this collaborative culture and make the rollout of onboarding tools a priority. Your IT or platform team is also a great resource to help you understand all the tools used across the organization, as they are likely the ones who helped install or maintain these applications.
Once you have a clear understanding of all the tools used across the organization, you can then empower the platform teams to begin the balancing act of integrating tools into the technology stack while ensuring that products are delivered seamlessly and every team member is happy with what what’s left
The Balancing Act Of Managing Tool Sprawl
Technology leaders today must be able to do more with less. Even organizations with huge budgets should refrain from spending on hundreds of tools with different licensing agreements, costs and business implications. While cutting tools is critical to success, it must be done with careful thought and must come from leadership.
How can organizations effectively strike a balance between leadership and developer preferences to manage the proliferation of tools? It’s important to understand what leaders and developers need in their toolkit to be happy.
The leadership perspective
• Alignment with business goals: Leadership usually focuses on overall business goals. They will want to prioritize tools that deliver strategic value, such as analytics platforms, project management software, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
• Cost-effectiveness: Leaders are naturally concerned with the ROI of tools. They look for solutions that bring tangible benefits while minimizing unnecessary costs.
• Scalability: Leaders prioritize tools that can scale as the organization grows and integrate seamlessly with existing systems to avoid disruption.
Developer perspective
• Functionality and efficiency: Developers prioritize tools that boost their productivity and streamline their workflows. They often prefer specialized tools for coding, testing, debugging and development.
• Flexibility and customization: Developers appreciate tools that allow customization and flexibility to fit their unique workflows and preferences.
• Collaboration and Communication: Developers require tools that facilitate seamless collaboration with team members, such as version control systems, communication platforms, and issue tracking software.
Being able to make the final decision about which tools stay and go depends on communication between teams. Fostering open communication between leadership and developers is essential to understanding each other’s perspectives, identifying common goals, and collaboratively choosing the most appropriate tools. Regular meetings, feedback sessions and cross-functional workshops can facilitate this dialogue.
conclusion
Balancing the spread of tools between leadership and developers requires a concerted effort to understand each team’s perspectives, communicate effectively, and collaboratively select tools that align with organizational goals and individual needs. When leadership prioritizes a tool reduction effort, promotes open communication, and makes happiness a return-on-investment metric, organizations can mitigate the challenges posed by tool proliferation and create a harmonious tool ecosystem that boosts productivity, innovation and cooperation.
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