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, the sales pitch from almost every platform in our space obsessively focuses on features: this module, that integration, this analytics dashboard, as if the problem were ever about what the software can do!
It isn't. The problem is almost always about what people actually do with it.
The numbers are startling
Research from Zylo, one of the world's leading SaaS management platforms, found that around half of all enterprise software licence spend goes unused. Nearly seven in ten organisations report 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.
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, Survey Monkey 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 tool does one thing adequately. None of them talks to each other. And nobody has a complete picture of what's happening with their stakeholders. 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
Our competitors, most of whom are based in Canada or Australia, with limited or no UK presence, compete 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.
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 worked with us to start with a small group of 25, built confidence through hands-on support, and gradually grew their user base 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.
The ROI Imperative
This blog post is the first article of a four-part series entitled 'The ROI Imperative'. Written by Tractivity's Chairman, Paul Rivers, this series explores why most organisations fail to get full value from their software investment, and what genuine client success looks like in practice.
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