Despite years of aggressive technology evolution, businesses lost an average of $104 million last year due to digital inefficiencies.
This is impacting organizations’ workforces and growth potential – and the culprit behind these losses is not the technology itself.
Senior Vice President and General Manager for Digital Workplace Solutions at Unisys.
Digital solutions can offer many benefits. However, when technology systems fail to integrate, security tools may hinder progress rather than efficiently identify threats, and workforce applications may slow employees down instead of saving them time.
This is why companies should focus on implementing the right tools cohesively across their systems, rather than simply adding quick fixes – otherwise, they risk draining productivity rather than enhancing it.
The hidden cost of fragmentation
Today’s office workers have access to technology and resources that were previously unimaginable. Yet they are struggling: 70% of employees spend upwards of 20 hours per week simply chasing information across different systems. That’s half of a work week lost to mundane tasks, which technology is meant to solve.
In practice, this disrupts teams across organizations. Employees are left to toggle between disconnected applications, re-enter the same data across multiple platforms and wait for IT to resolve issues that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
When systems fail to integrate properly, people often create workarounds – usually bypassing security protocols in the process – which introduce new risks while temporarily resolving productivity bottlenecks.
Meanwhile, IT teams face an avalanche of repetitive tickets, from password resets, access requests, connectivity issues and application conflicts. These aren’t complex technical challenges requiring specialised expertise. Instead, they are representative of a fragmented tech stack, resulting in unnecessary work for everyone involved.
The real problem, however, is not with the wasted time but the loss of human potential. Talented employees hired for their strategic thinking and creativity spend their days navigating clunky interfaces and battling unresponsive systems.
This creates constant frustration among top performers, which, over time, erodes engagement, limits innovation, and ultimately drives people to seek opportunities elsewhere.
Building an adaptive, integrated system
The solution to a fragmented tech ecosystem requires businesses to rethink their approach to technology. Instead of viewing IT infrastructure as a collection of separate tools, they must view it as an interconnected system that senses, responds, and adapts in real-time.
This requires companies to examine past connected components of an adaptive system that operates on three core principles. First, the system must enable self-healing capabilities that identify and resolve issues before users are even aware of them.
Rather than waiting for frustrated employees to submit help desk tickets, the system proactively detects anomalies – such as application slowdowns, connectivity drops, or configuration drifts – and corrects them automatically.
Next, technology ecosystems must deliver adaptive security that ensures protection without disrupting progress.
This requires businesses to forego one-size-fits-all policies that treat every user and every context identically and instead focus on systems that continuously evaluate risk based on behavior, location, device health and data sensitivity.
This approach ensures leaders remain in control when threats emerge and relax them when the risk is low, providing robust protection that employees barely notice.
Ultimately, an adaptive system enables continuous optimization through machine learning, thereby improving the employee experience over time. By analyzing usage patterns, the system learns which applications people use together, when they require specific resources, and where they encounter challenges.
It then proactively allocates access and streamlines work for relevant employees, so they don’t need to spend time guessing what tools they may need.
The competitive imperative
This transformation isn’t optional anymore. As today’s business climate evolves and cyber threats grow increasingly sophisticated, enterprises operating on legacy patchwork systems will suffer.
The evidence is clear: 78% of organizations report increased efficiencies after consolidating digital platforms. More importantly, strong digital employee experience directly improves productivity (87%), employee satisfaction (85%), and retention (77%).
Companies that successfully build unified systems will have a competitive advantage over their peers. They will see IT issues drop significantly as issues resolve autonomously, and employee satisfaction will rise as technology enables, rather than impedes, their work.
Most importantly, IT resources will shift from dealing with repetitive fire drills to strategic initiatives that actually move the business forward.
Consider what this means in practice. Instead of dedicating teams to password resets and access provisioning, IT leaders can focus on innovation, automation and competitive advancements. Instead of losing productive hours to system juggling, employees can dedicate their full attention to the work they were actually hired to do.
The enterprises that thrive in the years ahead won’t be those with the most digital tools – they will be those with the most intelligent integration of those tools.
Just as businesses once couldn’t compete without adopting digital technology, they soon won’t be able to retain talent or maintain security without evolving from siloed systems to a unified digital workplace. The question now isn’t whether to make this switch, but instead how quickly they can do so.
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