This is the first in a four-part series, 'The ROI Imperative', by Tractivity Chairman Paul Rivers, exploring why most organisations fail to get full value from their software, and what genuine client success looks like.
Check out the other articles in the series: Article 2 | Article 3 | Article 4.
You're probably paying for software you're barely using. So is everyone else.
I've spent years working with organisations that manage complex stakeholder relationships: councils, NHS trusts, infrastructure bodies, and energy companies. And in that time, I've observed something that nobody in the software industry really wants to say out loud: most organisations use a fraction of the software they pay for.
And yet most software conversations in our space, ours included, start with features: this module, that integration, this analytics dashboard. That is the easier conversation to have, but it was never really the problem.
It isn't. The problem is almost always about what people actually do with it.
The numbers are startling
Research from Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index found that organisations leave an average of 36% of their SaaS licences unused. A related problem is what analysts call "tool overlap", paying for multiple products that do the same thing, often without realising it.
And it gets more pointed: IBM's 2024 research found that one in three data breaches now involves so-called shadow IT, software that employees are using that the organisation doesn't even officially know about. The average large enterprise now manages somewhere between 100 and 300 SaaS applications, depending on size. Many of those are ungoverned, unreviewed, and actively creating risk. We understand the need for governance and complete multiple IT investigative questionnaires for each new client that we win.
And it gets more pointed. IBM's 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that more than one third of breaches involved shadow data, which IBM defines as data stored in unmanaged data sources, and put the global average cost of a breach at $4.88 million. Large organisations now run SaaS estates numbering in the hundreds of applications, and any part of that estate nobody owns is a part nobody is reviewing. We understand the need for governance and complete multiple IT investigative questionnaires for each new client that we win.
I'm not sharing these statistics to alarm you. I'm sharing them because they describe a pattern I've seen at close quarters, and because understanding the pattern is the first step to breaking it.
The mustard left on the side of the plate
There's a phrase I use internally at Tractivity: the mustard on the side of the plate. Most people don't eat the mustard. But they ordered it. And in software terms, they're paying for it month after month, renewal after renewal.
When we talk to prospective clients, we rarely find an organisation that is maximising what its current systems can do. What we find instead are teams juggling Outlook for contacts and communications, SurveyMonkey for opinion gathering, Eventbrite for events, Mailchimp for newsletters, and a collection of spreadsheets that exist in silos, are maintained inconsistently, and are essentially invisible to leadership. Each of those tools does its own job well, and each publishes integrations: Mailchimp lists more than 300, SurveyMonkey publishes an integrations directory and app directory, and Eventbrite publishes an App Marketplace and a developer platform. What nobody has built is the joined-up record, one place where a stakeholder's survey response, event attendance and email history sit against the same name. In essence, the Silo working.
That fragmentation isn't just inefficient. It's genuinely risky. And I'll come back to that in a later post.
Why the feature race is the wrong conversation
Software in our space is usually sold on features. This module, that dashboard, this AI capability. And I understand why: it's an easier conversation to have in a product demo than the harder questions about adoption, governance, and organisational behaviour. It is worth asking every supplier, us included, where its software is built and where its support team sits, because those are simple questions with checkable answers.
Of course, we can do the same, pick the features that are unique to Tractivity, but that leads to the wrong focus. It’s so easy now to simply use an AI tool for evaluation, but that misses the point.
The point is that features are irrelevant if they're never used. And they're never used if the organisation hasn't been helped to embed the tool, to migrate their data, to train their people, and to keep asking - month after month - whether they're getting the return on investment they came for. National Grid is a good example: rather than deploying Tractivity to hundreds of users on day one, they built confidence through hands-on support and successfully deployed the platform to over 400 users. That phased, supported approach is exactly what turns a software purchase into genuine adoption.
That is the conversation we try to have. Not 'look at all the things our software can do,' but 'let's make sure your organisation is actually doing the things that matter, which is almost always not the newest fringe feature or the latest shiny bells and whistles.'
Software doesn't deliver ROI. People using software deliver ROI. The platform is just the enabler.
In the next post, I'll explain how we've built a team and a methodology specifically designed to ensure that our clients are part of the positive statistics on usage and actually get what they pay for, and what that looks like in practice.
Frequently asked questions
Most organisations fail to get ROI from software because the problem is not what the software can do, but what people actually do with it. Research from Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index found that organisations leave an average of 36% of their SaaS licences unused. The root cause is consistently the same: organisations are sold on features but not helped to embed the tool, migrate their data, train their people, or review whether adoption is actually happening. Without that ongoing support, software sits unused, paid for month after month without delivering the return it was procured to achieve.
