Tool sprawl is dangerous, warns Apple MDM vendor Kandji

Do you keep a toolbox at home? Is it stuffed with tools for every possible task? When it comes to finding the one you need, how quickly do you find it, and how well are you maintaining your collection? These challenges are the same in enterprise technology, where a new survey from Apple MDM vendor Kandji tells us people are spending way too much time managing way too many tools.

Too much (time) pressure

If you stop to consider it, the enterprise technology ecosystem is fractured, with tools for every imaginable task. Your company may have chosen to deploy or support dozens of these things, handling everything from BOSS to B2C functions and everything in between. AI tools are just the latest example of the need to manage tech to enter the fray.

Each of these tools needs to be understood, managed, maintained, all of which takes time — a lot of time, according to Kandji’s latest report. If your company chooses to deploy dozens of these systems, you should also consider the consequential costs of doing so.

Based on a survey across 1,000 IT and security pros, it tells us:

40% of IT admins/IT managers spent over half of their time each week on maintenance work. Just 26% spend the majority of their time each week on strategic work. 

When it comes to optimizing their present technology stack, better integration between tools (61%) and better automation (49%) are the highest priorities for IT teams, even higher than lowering total costs (40%). 

41% cite security risks from poor or missing integrations; 40% say compliance/audits take too much time.

For security teams, their priorities are better integrations between tools (56%) and managing security risks due to poor or missing integrations (52%).

Integration problems between different tools from different providers are all too familiar: Too many of the tools in use across businesses host overlapping functions, or their poor integration poses security risks. Sure, you can — and should — give everyone a Mac for work, but you’ll cancel those benefits out if you confuse the experience with too many tools to manage and use. (This may also be why Apple Intelligence’s on-device, platform-based utility may make that service even more useful in future.)

Wasting time, standing still

But, what I find most thought-provoking about the numbers listed above is that they show that some of your most valuable employees (IT staff) are spending almost half their time just maintaining the tools you use. That’s part of the job, of course, but also means that when you want to introduce new tech priorities or just want to switch your teams to a more strategic function, you can’t. You are effectively spending half your senior IT personnel budget managing the apps and services you already use.

It gets worse, too, because even at this stage of digital transformation many companies continue to have a very siloed approach to tech. (Surely the IT department and security department are the same team by now? Does marcoms tech really need to sit in a different stack?) Kandji tells us that 38% of admins are challenged by siloed ownership of tech used across their organization, while many complain of poor communication. Many also complain about the time costs of compliance audits, but I’ve a feeling that’s something that could be automated but cannot be ignored. 

All of these time-consuming tasks seem to have become a little unwieldy. But these are just some of a growing range of demands being made on tech teams as technology itself evolves into becoming a key business enabler, rather than a running cost.

Stressed out

These demands on their time are real, and the effect of wrangling all these priorities (and attempting to do so while being professional, polite, and to budget) is that over 60% of IT admins and IT managers Kandji spoke with for the survey are experiencing a medium to high burnout rate.

Given how essential technology has become to almost every business, that really isn’t good. Stressed-out team members are likely to get sick, quit, or ‘quiet quit’, leaving your company with recruitment, training, and — in some cases — knowledge transfer challenges.

Kandji argues its data proves that having too many tools to manage is directly a cause of burnout, evangelizing for better integration between the tools used in business and for the need for enterprise solutions to deliver consumer-simple user interfaces.

“This isn’t a matter of preference or productivity hacks. It’s a matter of retaining talent, protecting institutional knowledge, and safeguarding against attackers who exploit fragmentation,” the report states.

Ultimately, it’s not more tools we need to be productive. It’s more time to make better use of the tools we already have that is required.

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