Time for a Spring Cleaning? How to Make Your IT Smarter and More Secure

Does this sound familiar? Over the years, your IT landscape has mushroomed, but now you’ve lost track of what’s in place. You discover duplicate licences, underused applications, complex customisations, and systems that don’t integrate well. Meanwhile, costs and frustrations keep piling up. Many organisations struggle with unchecked growth in IT due to a lack of a clear IT strategy. This leads to inefficiencies, unnecessary expenses, and even security risks. It’s time for a spring cleaning!

Want to gain insight into your applications, eliminate redundant software, and create a leaner, smarter IT landscape? You can! In this blog, Emixa consultant Sophie Snippenberg guides you through the process.

Why You Need to Streamline Your IT Landscape

Over time, many organisations accumulate applications without a clear strategy. Software is added without a clear understanding of why it's needed or how it fits into the overall architecture. The result? A cluttered IT environment with rising costs, increasing complexity, and growing security and privacy risks. Let's zoom in: 

• Reduce Licensing Costs. Every application costs money, whether you use it or not. Organisations often pay twice for overlapping functionalities, licensing and maintenance fees. Smart consolidation could save serious money. 
• Reduce Management Costs. A fragmented, disorganised IT landscape is difficult to manage. IT teams waste valuable time on maintenance, updates, and troubleshooting integration issues between poorly connected systems. Did you know that all these systems consume lots of energy on servers, too? 
• Manage Security Risks. The more systems you have, the harder it becomes to keep them secure and compliant. Privacy laws require you to manage and protect personal data with controlled access. As your number of applications increases, so does the risk of data breaches. By rationalising your applications and systems, you reduce costs and complexity and improve security and compliance. A streamlined IT landscape makes it easier to manage risks and meet regulatory requirements. 
• Faster Time-to-Market. Often, companies struggle to introduce new products or services because it's very complex to weave these products into their IT systems. This extends the time-to-market and reduces the company's competitiveness. A streamlined IT landsccape helps you reverse that and to reducee time-to-market

How to Approach IT Streamlining

At Emixa, we consider IT a strategic asset, not just a set of tools. We don't just assess your systems, we align IT with your strategy, business processes, and organisation.

• What direction is your business heading? 
• What are the core principles of your IT strategy? 
• What does your current IT architecture look like? 
• Are there overlapping functionalities?
• Who uses which systems? 

Your business processes should guide your IT strategy. We always distinguish different types of processes that require different IT solutions: 

• Standard processes (HR, Finance, Procurement) should be efficient and streamlined. Using standard software helps minimise complexity and costs; this should cover around 80% of your processes. 
• Differentiating processes provide a competitive edge. They require flexible yet sustainable solutions, such as low-code platforms or specialised software, to add business value. 
• Innovative processes can offer future strategic advantages. Once your core IT is in place, explore pilot projects and Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) to test new ideas and refine them quickly. 

In many cases, outdated software is a major issue. However, phasing and changing your IT can sometimes meet resistance. That's why it's important to engage your people throughout the process. 

How to Get Started

There are several ways to tackle this. If you need a quick overview, a Quick Scan is a great starting point. We bring together key stakeholders from your organisation for a 1-2 day session to map out your processes and IT landscape. This helps you quickly understand your current state and the decisions ahead.

If you know you need a major overhaul, a Deep Dive is the way to go. Here, we dive into the details of your IT landscape and business processes. Together with key stakeholders, you’ll decide which applications to keep, remove, or replace—while also assessing the impact on your business processes and organisation.

Get in touch

Looking for a spring clean of your IT landscape and set a clear course? Let's talk!