Organizations often fall into the trap of simple cost-cutting when facing budget pressures. They reduce licenses, delay upgrades, or postpone critical projects. While these actions might create short-term savings, they typically lead to growing technical debt and reduced competitive capability. With current research showing 56% of IT budgets locked into maintenance activities, organizations need a more strategic approach to optimize their technology investments.
We believe that the answer lies in creating an experience layer in your technology stack that can be used to unify and consolidate access to all of your various SaaS platforms.
The Strategic Value of Experience Unification
The traditional approach to enterprise software has created a complex landscape where organizations maintain customizations across multiple SaaS platforms. Each platform requires its own development expertise, security configurations, and maintenance overhead. This fragmentation not only increases costs but also slows innovation and creates unnecessary complexity for users and IT teams alike.
Development Efficiency: Breaking Free from Platform Constraints
Most organizations today maintain customizations across multiple SaaS platforms, each requiring its own specialized development approach. A ServiceNow developer must understand ServiceNow's specific architecture, development patterns, and limitations. The same goes for Salesforce developers, Workday developers, and so on. This specialization creates significant overhead, as organizations must maintain multiple development teams or find increasingly rare (and expensive) developers who understand multiple platforms.
The upgrade cycle for these customized platforms presents another major challenge. When vendors release new versions, teams must carefully test and often modify each customization to ensure compatibility. This process can take weeks or months, consuming valuable development resources that could be better spent on innovation.
A unified experience layer enables development using standard programming languages and frameworks that most developers already know. Instead of maintaining multiple teams of specialized developers, organizations can leverage a broader talent pool of developers who work with common technologies like JavaScript and React. These developers can create and maintain experiences across all platforms, significantly reducing development overhead while increasing team flexibility.
Code reuse becomes much simpler as well. Rather than rebuilding similar functionality in each platform's proprietary development environment, teams can create components once and reuse them across multiple experiences. This not only speeds development but also ensures consistency and reduces maintenance burden.
Resource Optimization: Making Better Use of Talent
The traditional approach to enterprise software development creates artificial scarcity in the talent market. Organizations compete for developers with specific platform expertise, driving up costs and creating dependency on individuals with specialized knowledge. This not only increases direct costs but also creates risk when key team members leave.
By adopting a unified experience layer approach, organizations can fundamentally change their resource strategy. Instead of searching for developers with specific platform certifications, they can tap into the much larger pool of developers familiar with standard web technologies. This broader talent pool not only reduces hiring costs but also increases team flexibility and resilience.
Training becomes more efficient as well. Rather than sending developers to multiple platform-specific training programs, organizations can invest in strengthening core development skills that apply across all projects. This not only reduces training costs but also creates a more adaptable development team.
Integration Management: Simplifying the Complex
Traditional enterprise architecture often resembles a spider web of point-to-point integrations. Each connection requires individual maintenance, security monitoring, and ongoing testing. As organizations add more systems, the complexity grows exponentially, creating an unsustainable burden on IT teams.
An experience layer approach transforms this complex web into a more manageable hub-and-spoke model. Instead of maintaining dozens or hundreds of individual connections, organizations establish secure, stable connections through the experience layer. This not only reduces the number of integration points but also makes it easier to change backend systems without disrupting user experiences.
The impact on maintenance is significant. When issues arise, teams can quickly identify and resolve them through the centralized experience layer rather than debugging multiple integration points. This reduces downtime, improves service quality, and frees up IT resources for more strategic work.
Automating for Efficiency and Innovation
Strategic automation through an experience layer can transform how organizations deliver services and manage operations. Rather than automating processes within individual platforms, organizations can create comprehensive workflows that span multiple systems while maintaining a consistent user experience.
The Power of Cross-System Workflows
Large organizations juggle dozens, sometimes hundreds of different software systems. Each system serves a purpose, but getting them to work together creates major challenges. Two common examples show why this matters and how better workflow design can help.
Take employee onboarding. A new hire can't start work until they have building access, computer accounts, payroll setup, and workspace assignment. Each step involves a different department using different software. HR starts the process in their system. IT gets notified and uses their system to create email and network accounts. Facilities uses yet another system to handle building access and desk assignment. With all these separate systems, information gets lost, steps get missed, and new employees often face delays getting what they need to start work.
Asset management creates similar challenges. When an organization buys new equipment like laptops or servers, the purchase starts in a procurement system. Then finance needs that information for their asset tracking. IT needs it in their system to plan maintenance. Facilities needs to know where the equipment is installed. As equipment moves between departments or locations, each system needs updating. It's no surprise that organizations often lose track of expensive equipment or waste money buying duplicates because their records are wrong.
These broken processes hurt efficiency and waste money. The Kinetic Experience Platform fixes this by creating a layer that sits above all these systems. Instead of forcing people to work in many different systems, it creates a single, simple way to handle the whole process. Information flows automatically to all the right places. New employees get everything they need on time. Equipment stays tracked properly. Work gets done faster, with fewer mistakes and less frustration.
Enabling True Self-Service
Self-service portals often fall short of their potential because they're built within specific platforms, limiting their scope and usability - which forces you to maintain portals for each platform you bring on. An experience layer approach enables organizations to create comprehensive self-service capabilities that span multiple backend systems while maintaining a consistent, intuitive user interface.
For example, a unified service portal can handle requests ranging from IT support to facilities management to HR services, all through a single, familiar interface. Users don't need to learn multiple systems or remember different login credentials. This increased usability drives adoption, reducing support costs while improving user satisfaction.
Security and Compliance: A Unified Approach
Security and compliance requirements add significant complexity and cost to enterprise IT operations. The traditional approach of securing multiple user interfaces across various platforms creates unnecessary vulnerability points while increasing monitoring and maintenance overhead.
Centralizing Security Control
An experience layer approach enables organizations to implement security controls at a single point rather than managing them across multiple platforms. This centralization delivers several key benefits. First, it reduces the number of potential vulnerability points by consolidating authentication and access control. Second, it simplifies security monitoring and incident response by providing a single point of visibility into user activities. Finally, it makes it easier to implement and enforce consistent security policies across all applications.
Streamlining Compliance Management
Compliance requirements become increasingly complex when organizations must track and control user activities across multiple platforms. Each system may have its own audit trails, access controls, and compliance reporting capabilities. Coordinating these disparate systems to demonstrate compliance can be time-consuming and error-prone.
A unified experience layer simplifies compliance management by providing a single point of control and visibility. Organizations can implement consistent access controls, maintain comprehensive audit trails, and generate compliance reports that span multiple systems. This not only reduces the effort required for compliance management but also improves the accuracy and completeness of compliance reporting.
Enabling Innovation Through Cost Optimization
The savings generated through experience unification shouldn't simply flow to the bottom line. Forward-thinking organizations reinvest these savings into innovation initiatives that drive business value. The experience layer approach creates several unique opportunities for innovation.
Accelerating AI Adoption
Many organizations struggle to implement AI capabilities because their data and processes are scattered across multiple systems. An experience layer approach makes it easier to aggregate data and implement AI-powered features across multiple processes. Organizations can start with simple automations and gradually expand to more sophisticated AI applications as they prove value.
Improving Data Utilization
Data trapped in silos provides limited value. By creating a unified experience layer, organizations can more easily aggregate and analyze data from multiple systems. This enables better decision-making and creates opportunities for new data-driven services and capabilities.
The experience layer also makes it easier to implement data governance and quality controls consistently across multiple systems. This improves data reliability while reducing the effort required for data management.
Flexible Deployment for Maximum Value
The Kinetic Experience Platform supports multiple deployment options, enabling organizations to optimize their infrastructure costs while meeting security and compliance requirements. On-premises deployment allows organizations to leverage existing infrastructure and maintain complete control over their data. Private cloud deployment provides scalability and reduced infrastructure management overhead while maintaining security control. For organizations with the strictest security requirements, air-gapped deployment options ensure complete isolation while enabling modern digital experiences.
Building the Business Case
Successfully implementing an experience layer approach requires careful planning and a clear business case. Organizations should begin by documenting their current costs related to:
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Platform-specific development and maintenance
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Integration development and support
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Security and compliance management
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User training and support
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License and subscription fees
These baseline metrics enable organizations to project potential savings and benefits from an experience layer approach. However, the business case should go beyond pure cost savings to consider strategic benefits such as:
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Increased organizational agility
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Improved user satisfaction and productivity
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Enhanced security and compliance capabilities
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Accelerated innovation capabilities
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Reduced dependency on specific vendors or technologies
The Path Forward
Organizations looking to optimize their IT spending through an experience layer approach should start with a thorough assessment of their current environment. This includes understanding existing customizations, integration points, and pain points in the user experience.
Based on this assessment, organizations can identify high-impact opportunities for improvement. Common starting points include:
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High-volume service requests that span multiple systems
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Processes with significant manual intervention
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Areas with high support costs
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Systems with upcoming major upgrades
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Departments struggling with multiple user interfaces
The key is to start with projects that deliver clear value while building momentum for broader transformation. Each successful project not only delivers immediate benefits but also creates reusable components and patterns for future initiatives.
Looking Forward
As organizations face increasing pressure to deliver more value with limited resources, strategic IT spend optimization becomes crucial. The key is focusing on approaches that reduce complexity and maintenance overhead while enabling innovation and growth.
By implementing a unified experience layer, organizations can break free from the constraints of platform-specific development while creating better experiences for their users. The result is not just cost optimization but a more agile, efficient, and innovative organization better positioned for future success.
Sources:
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Deloitte IT Spending Analysis 2024
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MuleSoft Connectivity Benchmark Report 2024
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IDC IT Staffing Report 2024
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Gartner Digital Transformation Study 2024
