Organizations often lack a centralized IT architecture, resulting in each business unit trying to build its own set of tools. Lack of overall control causes a lot of duplicate systems and data inconsistency. IT initiatives in individual business units are driven by a short-term goal and are not well aligned with long-term organizational vision such as the digital transformation of the entire organization. Further, it adds complexity to maintain and upgrade those systems. Taking a simple step to define set standards and avoid duplication can help to save costs.

In the following diagram, you can see a complex architecture on the left-hand side, where business units are working in their own application without any standardization, which is causing duplicate applications with a lot of dependencies. This kind of architecture results in higher cost and risk. Any new experiment takes a long time to market, which results in losing the competitive edge. A standard...