Digitalisation got messy - fragmentation at scale
I’ve spent the last few years on the front lines of digital transformation. From strategy decks in London to design sprints in Vienna to product roadmaps in Zurich, I’ve worn various hats: innovation consultant, CX strategist, design team lead, product manager. Sometimes all within one project. If digitalisation had a backstage pass, I was usually holding it.
A couple of years ago, everyone was excited. Every company wanted to automate, optimise, digitise. Entire digital product teams were ramped up overnight. Vendors pitched slick software for every business function: invoice processing, onboarding, CRM, inventory management, timesheets, leave requests, customer service. You name it, someone had a tool for it.
And so we built. And bought. And licensed. And integrated...well, sort of.
The result - the gold rush of building and buying tools created quite a mess.
A tool for everything. A headache to match.
Almost every company I’ve worked with ended up with the same story: a bloated, fragmented landscape of tools. One tool to track time, another to manage projects. A CRM that doesn’t talk to the support tool. A compliance app built with a completely different design language. It’s manageable, until it’s not.
Because the problem isn’t each tool in isolation. The problem is what happens when real-life jobs stretch across multiple systems.
Imagine an employee trying to resolve a client issue. They open the CRM to get context, switch to the product database to verify account info, jump to the ticketing system to log the issue, and finally escalate via email - because nothing’s integrated. That’s not a workflow. That’s a wild goose chase.
In one of our projects with a private bank, we ran an internal analysis and found that relationship managers used 42 different front-end tools just to complete their core tasks. From portfolio management to onboarding, compliance to trading - each lived in its own bubble.
You can guess how much of their day was spent not talking to clients, but toggling between tabs and updating tools that didn’t talk to each other.
That’s not digitalisation. That’s fragmentation at scale.
The next step: From tool chaos to end-to-end experiences
But here’s the good news: we’re entering the next phase of digital maturity, and it’s all about consolidation.
Leading companies are already doing it. Uber, for example, built a unified internal platform called uAct (Unified Action Platform) to streamline how employees interact with their tools. Instead of hopping between dozens of disconnected systems, Uber staff can manage everything from HR requests to compliance tasks to performance reviews - all within a single interface. And they didn’t get there by reinventing the wheel. They got there by consolidating existing tools, enforcing a consistent design system, and building on enabling technologies like micro-frontends. (Source: Uber Engineering Blog, 2023)
BUT - consolidation is not just about removing tools and fucntionalities. It's about understanding, designing and managing user journeys end-to-end. When you manage journeys holistically, you see the full picture: the handovers, the pain points, the redundancies. This clarity is what enables the real transformation.
What is a user journey and why should I care?
A user journey shows the steps someone takes to get something done, like opening an account. It helps you see where things are smooth and where they get stuck. If you want better tools and happier users, start by understanding their journey.
The payoff of managing user journeys end-to-end goes far beyond better UX. Consolidating your tool landscape is a major cost lever. During these initiatives, we regularly uncover redundant tools and functionalities that no one actually uses. Remnants of old vendor decisions or well-intentioned prototypes that never took off. Decommissioning them reduces license fees, simplifies maintenance, and cuts down on the hidden tax of ecosystem complexity.
What does this mean for you?
Do it like Uber, the 4 key ingredients to kickstart the consolidation of your fragmented tool landscape are already on the table.
- Understand and map your end-to-end user journeys to steer your transformation
- Introduce an enterprise-wide design system to create a consistent, seamless user experience across all tools
- Leverage micro-frontends to stitch together capabilities from different services, without rewriting everything from scratch
- Establish a composable architecture that’s flexible enough to adapt as your business evolves
We’ve applied this approach with one of our clients. Together, we:
- Mapped their existing tool landscape
- Identified the most critical employee journeys
- Uplifted the necessary capabilities into a unified design system
- And stitched it all together using micro-frontends - into a single, streamlined tool that delivers seamless, end-to-end journeys
The result?
- Significant cost savings through tool decommissioning
- Efficiency gains by reducing tool-hopping and context-switching
- Higher employee satisfaction through intuitive, consistent workflows
- And a scalable foundation for future growth and innovation
🚀 Time to clean up the mess?
At bontiq, we focus on Digitalisation 2.0. It isn’t about adding more tools. It’s about making the right ones work/come together.
Let's talk if you are interested to hear more.
