Your company should have more enterprise applications, not fewer. Here is why

The common wisdom across CIOs is that an organization should have as few enterprise applications as possible. The logic behind it is understandable - fewer vendors, economy of scale, fewer data silos, less training required, etc. Yet, the rule is not universal. It can (and does) harm when applied blindly. At least when it comes to data tools.

I suggest rewriting the rule as follows:

For stateful applications, the fewer the better. For stateless applications, the more can be the better.

If you're not familiar with it, the concept of stateful/stateless comes from software development. The idea is simple: if an application stores data (state) then it's stateful. If it doesn't then it's stateless. For instance, a CRM system is a stateful application because it stores data. A text editor (think Notepad) is not, because it has no data storage and only allows editing text files that are stored in an external storage (e.g. a Windows folder).

Having many stateful applications doesn't look like a good idea, indeed. Data silos is always a problem and is almost never an upside (unless demanded by special security requirements). Moving data between applications, consolidating it, reporting on it - the complexity of such tasks grows exponentially when the number of stateful applications increases.

But with stateless software tools the case is different - you would want to have more of them. Why? Because in your kitchen you have not only spoons, but also knives and forks (or maybe chopsticks). Your car mechanic has all kinds of wrenches, screw drivers, and hammers. You definitely don't want him to repair your car using only a hammer.

Better tooling means better work efficiency. In general, the more complex and sophisticated is the work, the wider range of tools would be required. When it comes to data, the wider spectrum of data transformations and analysis is required the broader range of data processing tools is necessary.

You may still be thinking that there should be that magical unicorn - a one-can-do-everything data tool. Well, the best candidate for it would be Excel. There is no more universal data tool in the world than Excel.

Not happy with sticking to only Excel? It's time to add more tools to your data toolkit. May I suggest you to start with adding EasyMorph?