“I give the customer what he wants. I don’t think it’s my place to offer dietary advice. If they want red meat and boiling tar… then buon appetito,” said Tom Wambsgans, Shiv Roy’s husband and head of one of Waystar Royco’s divisions, in hit TV drama Succession.

This idea of feeding customers what they think they want regardless of the consequences is not necessarily a new one. While Wambsgans hit the nail on the head with Waystar Royco’s approach to customers, how many IT leaders can look at their mix of software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps, platforms and IT services and not feel that, somewhere along the line, they’ve been oversold?

This sums up nicely the almost Wild West approach of buying IT during the pandemic, when SaaS, for obvious reasons, had something of a growth spurt. The problem for many of these organisations is that data, which is needed for the efficient running of SaaS applications, resides in different enterprise systems. Often, the only way to overcome this is to buy a new SaaS product designed specifically to plug data gaps between enterprise systems with no application programming interfaces (APIs) in place. And so it goes on.

According to a NetApp’s 2023 cloud complexity report, released in March, 98% of senior IT leaders have been affected by increasing cloud complexity in some capacity, potentially leading to poor IT performance, loss in revenue and barriers to business growth.

In its recent report, Innovate or Fade, Accenture talked about the current “technology deficit”, which refers to “the disparity in adoption, implementation or effective use of technology (both established and leading edge) to create business value”.