The Not-So-Hidden Costs of Device Management Tool Sprawl

Tool sprawl is a problem as old as software, and it’s a pain almost every enterprise is feeling around device management today. Whether you’re managing iOS check-in kiosks, Windows point of sale systems, Android inventory management handhelds, or AI edge devices running Linux, it can feel like there’s no way to unify and streamline your toolchain without making major functional tradeoffs or incurring hugely costly rip-and-replace projects.

Is there a way out of device management tool sprawl, especially considering every organization’s particular toolchain and the challenges it creates are likely a one-in-a-million set of specific circumstances? Put simply: Yes, though every organization’s path is going to look a bit different — which is why it’s crucial to put together a strategy to tackle tool sprawl, not just seek out a silver bullet.

What Are the Costs of Device Management Tool Sprawl?

As the complexity of your device management toolchain grows, you lose agility, visibility, and control — all of which have very demonstrable costs to your organization, both at the business and human level. 

• Fragmented customer experiences: You’re launching a customer activation campaign on your self-checkout kiosks, digital display signage, and POS systems to support a new menu item, but it takes weeks to deploy the content across every form factor — fragmenting your product launch.
• Slower growth: You want to expand mobile POS usage at your retail locations, but the provisioning process on your MDM means every store will need on-site support, adding months to your launch timeline.
• More IT overhead: Your teams need to switch between multiple consoles and dashboards, multiple times a day, to resolve issues depending on whether it’s a Windows POS, iOS kiosk, or Android handheld, increasing MTTR and reducing overall fleet visibility.
• Higher TCO: You pay for the licensing cost of each MDM you have to support, but also pay indirect organizational costs — training, time spent building integrations and custom workflows, and redundant operational tasks like applying device updates.
• Greater compliance risk: You have to juggle security policies for multiple operating systems, but don’t have a unified dashboard to determine full-fleet compliance, making policy drift complicated to manage. The chance of a compliance incident increases dramatically.

All of these operational costs have very direct business costs that follow: Downtime leading to lost revenue, loss of customer trust, legal risk, and reduced employee productivity.

Why Should I Assess My Device Management Tools?

As the costs make clear, the reasons to address tool sprawl are legion, but there are three “north stars” that should guide your decision-making process in addressing this challenge at the executive level.

1. Scale: Tool sprawl invariably creates weak points in your operations, and that brittleness tends to get exposed when device counts grow. While some parts of your toolchain may scale to device growth well, other components (like legacy MDMs) may completely fall apart under the pressure, bottlenecking strategic initiatives.

2. Agility: You’re only as fast to launch as your slowest device is. Tool sprawl can lead major application or content updates to drag on for weeks or months, delaying time to results and misaligning customer experience — worst case, you may have to take devices offline until your entire fleet is ready to go live, leading to lost revenue.

3. Innovation: There’s nothing worse than a great idea held back by poor-fit software — these are the real landmines of having too many device management solutions. When you’re ready to go to market with a competitive new device experience, your team should be focused on making it the best it can possibly be, not figuring out how to work around legacy tooling limitations.

How Do I Know if Tool Sprawl is a Problem in my IT Org?

It’s important to foster a culture of transparency when investigating tool sprawl. Your operations managers are probably solutions-oriented people, and their instincts may lead them to focus on addressing specific operational challenges. It’s crucial to get them to take a step back from fixes by asking targeted questions to determine if tool sprawl is a serious problem in your organization.

Questions for IT managers to investigate and assess device management solutions

These questions can serve as a starting point for conversations within your organization about tool sprawl. Think of them as icebreakers — they’re going to turn over the stones that might go unexamined in more outcome-driven discussions.

• How many different device management tools does your team work with? (Including any MDMs, EMMs, UEMs, for every OS and device type)
• How many device operating systems do you have to support?
• Are there any upcoming projects or launches that will further complexify the device toolchain?
• Day to day, what’s the most challenging tool in the chain you have to support? Why?
• What are some examples of scenarios where older or bad-fit tooling slows your team down?
• Irrespective of cost or feasibility, would your team get a lot of value out of a unified status dashboard and device management frontend?

These questions foster empathy for your team’s challenges, building rapport instead of asking them to pose solutions, which tends to create a sense of pressure and urgency.

Signs of fragmented device management solutions

After asking the above questions, you might see some themes start to emerge — and that’s generally where your “one in a million” level of complication reveals itself to be an all-too-common blend of tool sprawl scenarios.

• Needing multiple MDM/EMM solutions because of mixed operating system or mixed vendor device fleet (e.g., different MDMs for iOS, Android, and Windows, or MDM based on vendor requirements)
• Frequently assessing the need for new, centralized device management tooling when a new device or vendor is introduced (i.e., existing toolchain frequently fails to meet use case or workflow needs)
• Major feature gaps between different device vendors or operating systems (e.g., remote control on Windows, but not on Android; automatic configuration and app updates on iOS, but not Windows)
• Poor fit of tooling to use case (e.g., using your employee laptop and phone MDM to manage your kiosk or POS devices)
• Lack of visibility or situational awareness for particular devices or vendors (e.g., Windows device peripheral status must be checked by running a custom script and reading log output)

Once you’ve determined whether too many device management solutions sprawl is a problem at your organization broadly, congratulations: that’s the easy part. After all, very few teams will have a hard time articulating how a complicated toolchain makes their lives more difficult — and you’ll have no problem translating those operational challenges into business impacts.

How CIOs are Thinking About Device Management Tool Consolidation

The obvious counterpoint to tool sprawl is tool consolidation. But what does that even mean in the context of modern mixed OS and multi-vendor device fleets? 

Certainly, no sensible IT leader is going to make the business case to toss the entire toolchain in the dumpster, go on a spending spree to replace every piece of hardware in the fleet, and enforce one unified device management platform for every use case (and, consequently, choose to be beholden to that platform indefinitely). It’s not realistic from a cost perspective, and even if it was, it would be so operationally disruptive that it would be difficult to believe the juice was worth the squeeze.

Modern CIOs are putting their organizations on a fresh cultural footing, shifting priorities for how new devices and form factors are managed, and aligning their device phaseout and EOL strategies with device management migrations. Here are some of the questions they’re posing to drive this shift:

• Do we have a path toward a multiple OS management solution? (Aligning to an OS-agnostic device management culture)
• Does our device vendor selection process prioritize management solution flexibility? (Avoiding single vendor lock-in)
• Is our device management tooling evaluation process properly weighing automation-first and remote-first workflows? (Shifting device management culture to favor scale, repeatability, and speed) 
• Can we obtain greater control over long-term device update support to keep devices in the fleet longer? (Building toward ownership of the device stack)
• How can we ensure every device phaseout or EOL moves us closer to a unified device operations model? (Making streamlining an organizational imperative)

Actions for Streamlining Device Management Tools and Workflows

The first step in confronting device management tool sprawl is acceptance. This is an extremely common problem, and one that most organizations naturally “back into” as their device fleets grow and complexify over the course of many years. Communicate to your team that you recognize this didn’t happen overnight, or because of any one person’s decisions — and neither will addressing it. It takes a village.

Here are some of the steps to get started on your consolidation journey.

1. Map out your current (and future) device types and current device management tools. This one is pretty straightforward; just assemble a list of every device (type + vendor), the OS it runs (Windows, Android, iOS, Linux), and every device management tool in your org. Connect them up.
2. Identify high-overlap areas and best candidates for consolidation. For example, are you paying for multiple MDMs that support Android? Do you have POS devices running on multiple operating systems, managed through different platforms? These could be strong consolidation candidates. Low-overlap use cases (e.g., Linux servers, legacy versions of Windows, employee laptops) would be weak candidates for consolidation.
3. Define cross-OS functional requirements. Create a list of “MVP” features you’d need a consolidated device management platform to support across the cluster of operating systems and device types you identified with the most overlap. Avoid trying to consolidate every device and OS into a single platform — you probably won’t succeed. Outlier use cases may still need outlier solutions (e.g., BYOD smartphones tend to work best on EMM tools designed explicitly for that use case).
4. Shortlist platforms and seek demos. Do your research, find modern device management solutions, and present your list of MVP features alongside your desired operating system and device type/vendor support. Consider how they support unified workflows while balancing the management needs of different operating systems and device types. Create a list comparing the suitability of each solution, and choose the one with the best fit to your needs.
5. Run a 30-day PoC. Identify a test group of devices you can isolate from your fleet to run in a PoC, migrate them to the new platform, and test (ideally under live conditions). It’s important to migrate at least one example of every form factor, vendor, and operating system you intend to use on the platform — don’t cherrypick the ones that “work best.” Look for the weak link.

Once you complete your PoC, you’re well on the way to determining how your organization can best move forward with a device management tool consolidation strategy.