Why IT teams are reaching their breaking point
Years of building the modern enterprise have left IT buried under its own success. Uncomplicating is the answer.
On any given day, the IT team at one Fortune 50 global retailer juggles more than 2,500 software applications—tools for everything from payroll to procurement, each one demanding updates, integrations, and attention.
"We have too many niche applications addressing the same use cases," he adds. “I’d love to have a stack of maybe a hundred applications that can serve 90% of our use cases.” Instead, each employee loses an estimated 10 to 15 hours a week navigating the chaos—and that’s after 1,200 tools were previously deprecated.
Across industries, IT teams are reaching a breaking point. According to Freshworks' Global Cost of Complexity report, two-thirds face unplanned implementation costs and less than half see the returns they were promised. Integrating new tech takes 77% longer than expected, and excessive complexity cuts potential revenues by an average of 7%. The very teams that built the digital enterprise are now trapped maintaining it—and the overload is slowing growth.
“IT is no longer a cost center—it’s a strategic enabler and growth engine,” says Ashwin Ballal, CIO of Freshworks. “But when tool sprawl, process inefficiencies, and organizational complexity slow us down, we lose agility. By simplifying systems and streamlining how we work, we enable teams to focus on what truly matters—people, performance, and purpose—and turn complexity into momentum.”
Complexity has quietly become IT’s biggest productivity killer. Projects that should take months drag on for years. Burnout spreads as teams fight to keep systems from breaking under their own weight. And attempts to simplify—through new integrations or “fixes”—often make things worse.
Because of complexity, we end up losing really valuable engineers who know how to do this stuff.
Tech leader at a midsize business
Legacy systems and siloed data
After a rapid succession of mergers and acquisitions, one company in the survey found itself with four sales teams, four product teams, and four support teams, all using different tools. A plan to consolidate them looked simple on paper but took three times longer than expected.
A vendor arrived promising to import data and streamline operations within days. "But those few days turned into nine months," says a tech leader at the company, "because our data was in a million places and they don't understand it."
The vendor hadn’t anticipated the technical debt and siloed data buried in the company's legacy systems. What should have been a straightforward migration became an endless cycle of workarounds and patches, consuming resources that could have fueled actual innovation. "On a practical level, we were not ready for them, and they were not ready for us," the tech leader says.
Vendor misfires
Too often, the vendors are part of the problem. The pattern is familiar: A vendor arrives with glossy presentations and confident timelines. Months later, the project is still burning resources with no end in sight, and the team that was supposed to be building the future is stuck troubleshooting the present.
As a result, 43% of organizations report facing vendor holdups, while 32% find vendor support unhelpful when problems arise. Seventeen percent of IT teams are left to troubleshoot entirely alone and 25% launch new systems without adequate training or onboarding, according to the complexity report—learning to fly the plane while it's already in the air.
For IT teams that are barely keeping systems running, failed implementations don't just waste money. They consume months of effort that can never be recovered and narrow the department's focus to constant emergency response. And sometimes, the chaos drives valuable employees to leave.
The human cost of overload
Perhaps the worst downstream impact from complex software implementations is the toll it takes on the people tasked with making them work. When complex systems fail, the toll lands squarely on the people responsible for holding them together.
More than half (60%) of employees say they have considered leaving a company in the next year, with more than half of them citing organizational complexity and complicated processes as the top reasons. As well, 15% of employees report that one or more colleagues quit as a result of complexity. Some organizations have experienced 15% churn on key technical roles. For one IT leader, that churn was as high as 20% of his team after a failed rollout “crushed team morale.” Those losses can take years to recover.
"We end up losing really valuable engineers who know how to do this stuff," one tech leader says. "And when we lose a core engineer or project manager who knows how to get things done, it can take two or three years for someone new to gain that institutional knowledge."
As the pace of technology picks up, particularly in the age of AI, organizations risk falling behind if their IT teams are trapped in a web of complexity. Customer experiences will stall, innovation will slow, and the very systems built to accelerate growth will hold it back. For IT, the path forward isn't about managing more complexity—it's about clearing enough away so the teams that built the enterprise can transform it once again.
