Application Overload: How Here™ Safeguards Your Tech Investments While Enhancing Productivity

Across the world’s most high-stakes industries, chief information officers (CIOs) are facing a common challenge: application overload. With so much innovation occurring today, there’s seemingly always an incentive to subscribe to a new platform, undertake an extensive upgrade or pursue workflow enhancements to drive enterprise productivity. But for every application a company adopts, it must integrate the new functionality with the existing tech stack, offsetting every potential efficiency with a dose of inefficiency.

The problem is only intensifying. According to Okta’s 2024 Businesses at Work report, companies with 2,000 or more employees deploy an average of 231 apps, a 10% increase from last year. The problem is only magnified for knowledge workers in the most complex industries, such as finance and government, or those for whom rapid processes are imperative, such as contact center agents and client facing staff. With the constant need to adopt the latest tools while ensuring overall workflows remain efficient, CIOs are increasingly focused on creating a strong vendor and app rationalization strategy.

That’s easier said than done. In a highly complex technology landscape, how can organizations evolve their application strategies to optimize costs, increase operational efficiency, and remain agile in the face of constant change? Increasingly, the answer is setting up a unified desktop solution.

Vendor Lock-In: The CIO’s Worst Enemy

Many app providers talk a good game about easy adoption – once you’ve selected the best product for your firm’s needs, it’s just a matter of getting onboarded and watching employees reap the benefits. Unfortunately, it rarely works out that way. Most of these apps function well on their own, but when it comes to working alongside other tools in the workflow, the process breaks down – they are unable to share information across apps, facilitate smooth workflows or be accessed as part of a unified desktop view. For downstream processes, firms are often forced to adopt a different app from the same provider, as the convenience of a more consolidated workflow outweighs the benefits of selecting a best-of-breed system.

There are many reasons a firm might want to maintain an existing technology investment. Maybe employees have grown accustomed to a particular workflow that is unique to a given app. Or maybe the firm has already invested heavily in enhancing a platform, collaborating with the provider to build a unique solution. But while these reasons are legitimate, they can hamper a firm’s ability to rapidly adapt to business challenges and embrace the latest tools the market has to offer. The challenge for CIOs, therefore, lies in making the most of the apps deployed today while evolving them for any set of future priorities.

The only way to do this is to embrace modern, agile solutions. Organizations can’t simply rip and replace their apps every time they want to add new capabilities, nor should they be forced to get by with suboptimal workflows due to past decisions regarding technology. Instead, they need to adapt these legacy apps for a more dynamic world.

Application Rationalization with Here™ Enterprise Browser

Here™ Enterprise Browser is our answer to the application rationalization challenges plaguing CIOs today. By bringing disparate apps into a single workflow, we create a unified desktop solution that boosts enterprise productivity and business efficiency.

Our enterprise browser for productivity serves as a single point of access for all the tools and data that knowledge workers need to do their jobs. Through our Supertabs feature, combinations of individual apps can be curated into a seamless view on a single screen, reducing tab overload and the need for wasteful toggling. Thanks to our built-in interoperability, these apps can communicate with one another, share data and context across the desktop, eliminating tedious data entry and lookup processes. Here™ Enterprise Browser has been further enhanced with an actionable notification center and deep search capabilities, so employees can work quickly and productively while undertaking complex processes and navigating the increasingly fragmented desktop.

You’ll notice that none of these capabilities change how the apps themselves function – they’re all focused on making the existing apps as easy and useful as possible. By putting these capabilities into the proper context, we give organizations the opportunity to enjoy greater flexibility and save real dollars. Integration doesn’t need to mean adopting a monolithic system or redeploying a highly bespoke application – simply empowering employees to be more productive with their preferred tools can unlock the same gains while avoiding friction.

The result is an architecture that can be more easily adapted to ever-changing business requirements. The need to adopt new apps will never go away, but with a unified desktop solution at the foundation, CIOs can build toward the most holistically productive workflows possible – without worrying about integration or vendor reconciliation. In an enterprise landscape defined by uncertainty, that’s invaluable.

Meet the team at Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2024 US and Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2024 Barcelona for a live demo and to learn more.