Decide or Drown: Part 2 - Technical Gluttony
The Reckoning Has Arrived
This is Part 2 of the “Decide or Drown” series. If you haven’t read Part 1: The Illusion of Choice, start there - it covers the framework for making strategic technology decisions upstream so your teams don’t have to. This piece is about what happens when that framework doesn’t exist.
The technical debt collector is calling. And you’ve been dodging the phone for years.
Every organization I talk to right now is hearing the same mandate from leadership: do more with less. Cut costs. Streamline. Consolidate.
Most IT leaders hear this and start trimming licenses. They cancel the tools nobody’s logged into for six months. They negotiate harder with vendors. They call it optimization.
That’s not optimization. That’s rearranging deck chairs while the ship takes on water.
The real problem isn’t that you’re paying for tools you don’t use. It’s that you’re paying for tools that do the same thing, owned by different teams, solving the same problems in parallel, with nobody accountable for the accumulated weight of it all.
That’s technical gluttony. And the bill is due.
How We Got Here
Let’s be honest about the trajectory.
For the better part of a decade, the message from every corner of the industry was the same: move fast, adopt cloud, empower teams, innovate. Budget was available. Headcount was growing. The cost of saying “yes” to a new tool was low, and the cost of saying “no” was a fight nobody wanted to have.
So you said yes. A lot.
One team adopted Datadog. Another went with Splunk. A third built something custom on the ELK stack. Each choice made sense in isolation. Each team had good reasons. Nobody was wrong.
But nobody was looking at the whole picture either.
I’ve architected Azure environments for over 100 organizations across healthcare, energy, and enterprise. The pattern is almost universal: by the time leadership starts asking questions about tool sprawl, the sprawl is already load-bearing. Teams have built workflows around their chosen tools. Integrations exist. Tribal knowledge has accumulated. Ripping anything out feels like surgery without anesthesia.
So nothing gets ripped out. New tools get added. The pile grows. And every year, the maintenance burden increases while the budget for new initiatives shrinks.
That’s the gluttony cycle. Accumulate during the good times. Struggle to shed during the lean times. Repeat until the weight becomes unsustainable.
The Hidden Cost Nobody Tracks
Here’s what doesn’t show up on your cloud bill or your license inventory: the cognitive overhead of operating a fragmented environment.
Every duplicated tool is a training burden. Every parallel system is a context switch. Every team doing things their own way is an integration tax paid by whoever has to make those systems talk to each other.
Your engineers aren’t slow because they’re not talented. They’re slow because they’re navigating a maze that your organization built one “yes” at a time.
I call this the plumber’s pipes problem. We preach governance to our customers. We tell them to rationalize their tooling, consolidate their platforms, establish standards. Then we go back to our own environments and trip over the same chaos we’re warning them about.
The plumber’s pipes are always the worst. Because the plumber is too busy fixing everyone else’s pipes to fix their own.
But the “do more with less” mandate doesn’t care about your excuses. It doesn’t care that every tool had a good reason at the time. It just cares that you’re burning budget and headcount on maintenance instead of momentum.
Why This Is Actually Good News
Here’s the part most people miss: constraint is a gift.
When you have unlimited budget and unlimited runway, there’s no forcing function for hard decisions. You can keep every tool. You can let every team operate independently. You can defer the consolidation conversation indefinitely because the pain isn’t acute enough to justify the effort.
But when the budget tightens and the headcount shrinks, suddenly you have permission to do what should have been done years ago.
I’ve watched this play out in real time. Organizations that were stuck in analysis paralysis for years suddenly find clarity when the constraint becomes real. The debates about which monitoring platform to standardize on? They end, because you can’t afford to run three anymore. The resistance to shared infrastructure patterns? It dissolves, because the teams maintaining those bespoke configurations just got cut in half.
Constraint forces prioritization. Prioritization forces decisions. Decisions create clarity.
The organizations that will come out of this period stronger aren’t the ones who trimmed the most fat. They’re the ones who used the pressure to finally build the coherent platform they should have built all along.
The Shedding Process
If you’re an IT leader staring at a bloated tool landscape and a shrinking budget, here’s the honest truth: there’s no painless path out.
You will have to sunset tools that teams are emotionally attached to. You will have to force consolidation onto groups that don’t want it. You will have to make calls that aren’t popular, and own the consequences when the transition is bumpy.
But the alternative is worse. The alternative is slow erosion. The alternative is death by a thousand paper cuts as your best people leave because they’re tired of fighting the environment instead of building in it.
Start with visibility. You cannot shed what you cannot see. Build the inventory. Understand what you actually have, who owns it, what depends on it, and what it costs in both dollars and effort.
Then ruthlessly prioritize. Not everything can be consolidated at once. Pick the domain with the highest duplication and the lowest switching cost. Get a win. Build momentum. Move to the next domain.
Communicate the why, relentlessly. Your teams aren’t stupid. They know the environment is a mess. What they don’t know is whether leadership actually has a plan, or whether this is just another cost-cutting exercise that will make their jobs harder without making the organization better. Give them the vision. Show them what coherence looks like. Make the case that this isn’t about taking things away, it’s about clearing the path.
And accept that this is ongoing work, not a project. The gluttony didn’t accumulate overnight. It won’t be shed overnight either. Build the muscles for continuous rationalization. Make tool evaluation and consolidation part of how you operate, not a periodic fire drill when budgets get tight.
The Other Side
There’s a version of your organization that exists on the other side of this reckoning.
It’s leaner. It’s faster. Your engineers spend their time building instead of navigating. Your support model scales because the environment is coherent. Your new hires ramp faster because there’s a platform to learn, not a maze to memorize.
That organization is possible. But only if you treat this moment as an opportunity, not just a constraint.
The technical debt collector is calling. You can keep dodging, and watch the interest compound. Or you can answer the phone, negotiate the terms, and start paying it down.
The reckoning has arrived. What you do with it is up to you.
What’s Next?
Coming Next: Part 3: The Four Pillars (Publishing December 15, 2025)
In the next part, we move from diagnosis to action - a repeatable framework for evaluating technology decisions that accounts for your people, your customers, your business, and the measurement criteria that most organizations skip entirely.
Photo by Europeana on Unsplash
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