There is a joke that circulates in IT departments. It is one that I, a technologist with over 40 years of experience optimizing corporate budgets, have heard at nearly every large organization I have worked: "Why buy one solution when you can buy five at eight times the cost?"
Walk into almost any company with more than a thousand employees and you will find redundant reporting tools, overlapping corporate systems, and duplicate middleware quietly draining the budget — often without anyone quite remembering how it got that way, or being willing to be the one who cleans it up.
How Duplication Happens
Solution duplication rarely happens on purpose. It accumulates. I have identified four recurring causes:
Executive choice
Two leaders each have a preferred vendor, and without strong governance to force a single decision, both solutions get purchased. The CIO wants one platform for event management; the COO prefers another. Rather than resolve the disagreement, the organization buys both — and then pays a second, third, and fourth time to stitch them together everywhere they touch.
Un-decommissioned legacy systems
A company adopts Technology A. Five years later, Technology B comes along and is clearly superior, so the organization invests in it too. But Technology A is now embedded in a dozen downstream systems, so it cannot simply be switched off. Multiply this pattern over a decade or two, and you can end up with five or more overlapping technologies doing variations of the same job.
Geographic or organizational fragmentation
Decentralized IT organizations often let different offices — different cities, different product silos, or even different desks within the same trading floor — standardize on different tech stacks. It is the executive-choice problem, just distributed across geography or organizational structures instead of personalities.
Genuine business justification
Sometimes multiple systems really are necessary. Not all duplication is waste — which is exactly why it needs to be examined rather than assumed.
The Goal Is Not One System — It Is One Conversation
Here is the important nuance: the objective of a solutions landscape review is not to force every function down to a single tool. It is to make sure that wherever more than one solution exists, the right people have actually debated whether that is necessary — rather than duplication simply happening by default because nobody was in the room to say no.
More often than not, it is a lack of communication, appropriate Enterprise Architecture controls, and indifference that leads to added costs for the organization. Just surfacing the problem by cataloguing what exists and asking why is often enough to prompt senior management to act, especially once the dollar figures are on the table.
An Insurance Case Study: 25 Systems Down to 12
One clear illustration that I have encountered was an insurance company running 25 insurance administration systems at a combined cost of tens of millions of dollars per year in maintenance and support. Some of the systems dated back to the 1960s and '70s.
At first glance, this might look like an extreme case of institutional inertia. But when we catalogued the systems and sat down with business partners, we found a partially legitimate explanation: five of the systems were genuinely justified by differences in product line, business model, and process.
The other twenty were harder to defend. The argument for keeping them was that the insurance policies created on a system needed to exist on that system for its entire life cycle. As these policies were life insurance, they differed significantly from car or health insurance, where a new system can simply take over as policies renew annually, cycling out the old system within a year. A life insurance policy, by contrast, might be written for a newborn and not end for over a century.
We had to push back on this assumption and constraint. The real artifact of the policy, we argued, was the signed contract between the insurer and the client — not the aging IT system used to administer it. The system was simply an approximation of that contract, and there was no reason a policy's record could not be migrated to a modern platform while its terms remained exactly as signed.
It was a heavily debated point, but the argument won out. Over the following three years, the 25 systems were consolidated down to 12, with a roadmap toward an eventual five-system end state — cutting a meaningful share of the substantial annual run rate.
What This Means for Your Organization
The lesson is not to consolidate everything. It is that most large organizations are carrying real, quantifiable cost from solutions nobody has recently been forced to justify. A practical starting point:
- Inventory what you actually have. List every solution, vendor and homegrown, along with its full cost — including infrastructure, support staff, and any legacy dependencies it is propping up.
- Group the solutions by function. Where do two or more systems appear to do the same job?
- Ask why, out loud, with the right people in the room. Not everyone will agree, and sometimes the duplication really is justified. That is fine. The point is that it was decided, not inherited.
- Prioritize by materiality. A handful of high-cost systems will usually offer more savings than dozens of minor ones.
I have found that the effort to catalogue the landscape and hold the workshops needed to debate it typically has a high ROI. In an era where every IT budget is under scrutiny, the question worth asking is not whether your organization has redundant systems. It is whether anyone has recently been willing to ask why and deal with the fallout from the answers.
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