Rationalisation

Businesses often experience platform or tool sprawl as they evolve. There will be one or more tools for purchase and inventory, one or more for customer relations, one or more for communication, the list goes on. The mesh of tool-sets and technologies used can become a noose of complexity which bottlenecks scaling. Rationalisation is the process of consolidating and streamlining these platforms and tools to remove clutter.

Tool-set duplication often occurs when different business or product streams are created in isolation of others. Often such cases exist when a new initiative is trailed and, before too long, evolves into a successful income stream. Create in isolation, there is concern that pulling it into the main will somehow break it. So it remains isolated and continues to duplicate functionality.

For each additional platform, there is an exponential increase in complexity.

Many parts of the business will need to compromise for the greater good. In some cases, favourite and sometime even the best tools will need to be sacrificed in favour of tools that just get the job done that are seamlessly integrated and reduce the exponent factor by a point.

Adding tools to synchronise data does not make the architecture less complex. In fact it add to the complexity. Complex environment are harder to scale.

Rationalisation does not mean stripping the entire systems architecture out and starting again. It is taking a good look at each component and determining if the functionality can be adequately provided by an alternate existing platform.

High performing organisations understand that unnecessarily complex environments hinders growth and continuous service improvement. They periodically rationalise to remove clutter opening the door to enable the next growth run to begin.