Enterprises may accumulate a mass of various tools, each added at the time in response to a need or a technology change. Even when companies try to standardize on a strategic toolset, they may continue to bear the burden of outdated, broken, or duplicate tools.
The process of Tools Rationalization is the systematic analysis of the products, services, and applications being used by the enterprise. The result is a determination of which tools should be kept, replaced, or retired. Tools Rationalization is often performed across a specific domain such as Information Security, Cloud, or Identity &Â Access Management, though it may also be applied more broadly.
In one recent engagement, our client was divested from a larger company and engaged Hybrid Pathways to perform an Information Security Tools Rationalization with a roadmap for their Cloud-only strategy. This client was spending over $1.5MM on security tools and managing 45 vendors. After a two-month rationalization project, Hybrid Pathways delivered a strategy that saved the company approximately $1 million dollars and reduced the vendor count from 45 to 20, a 63% cost savings and 45% reduction in number of vendors.
The benefits of this Tools Rationalization project extend far beyond the financial and process gains and met the client’s other success criteria including providing competitive advantages, improved security, and an infrastructure that allows faster time to market.
How Do You Conduct Tools Rationalization? – Steps to Success
To get started on our journey towards an improved toolset, let’s take a trip across the “Seven Cs” of Tools Rationalization:  Capability, Cost, Compliance, Cleanup, Cloud, Customers, and Change.
1. Catalog Current Capabilities
A capability mapping exercise will help to clarify the current maturity within a given domain, such as Information Security or Identity &Â Access Management (IAM). Be realistic about what maturity level is required. Not every tool or process needs to be implemented at an advanced level.
2. Control Costs
As we saw in the Case Study above, cost control easily justifies taking the time to perform Tools Rationalization. If the scope and maturity of your capabilities can be improved while cutting costs, the business gains value.
3. Cover Compliance and Cybersecurity
Today industry standards and cybersecurity requirements affect virtually every business, across verticals and geographies, from small mom-and-pop shops to large enterprises. When choosing new tools, ensure that you understand your organization’s governance and compliance requirements.
4. Cleanup and Consolidation
Many modern tools perform more than one function or are available as suites of tools with strong integration between components. Is it possible for you to choose a new tool that can replace several existing ones?  If so, you may reap benefits like lower total cost, better automation, better reporting, and greater ease of use.
5. Consider the Cloud
Sometimes it may be advantageous to outsource a capability to a third-party provider, rather than keep the design, build, and run functions in-house. Consider SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, and IDaaS: Software-, Infrastructure-, Platform-, and Identity-as-a-Service, respectively. The total cost of ownership may be lower when leveraging a cloud provider, and if the provider is responsible for patching and maintenance, compliance requirements may be easier to satisfy.Â
6. Cater to Your Customers
Are your customers happy with the ways they interact today across the mobile, web, and voice channels? What tools or practices could be improved to deliver the biggest gains for your customers? Tools that help to bring together customer experiences across channels may make interactions easier for the customers, and potentially reduce fraud attempts and helpdesk costs.
7. Control Change
Buy-in can be a bit more challenging in Enterprise IT. It’s likely that some changes will be smaller (“Quick Wins”) while others will be transformational (pronounced “ex-PEN-sive“). Communication and stakeholder buy-in are the keys for moving forward. Depending on the scope of your transformation, developing a roadmap may also help to show how you intend to control the sequence and the timing of changes.
Concluding Comments
Are you ready to start reaping the rewards of a more mature and streamlined tool set? A Tools Rationalization exercise should be one of your first steps: It will help you to understand where you are and where you can be, and it facilitates communicating the benefits to your stakeholders. Showing cost savings over time is one of the best ways to justify Tools Rationalization and subsequent changes. But remember that there can be many other benefits such as better customer experience and improved compliance that help you to gain even wider support.
