I've worked on consolidation programs that started with an audit of "how many apps do we actually have?" The answer was always worse than anyone expected. Every large enterprise with multiple markets, brands, or business units eventually faces the same problem: digital sprawl. Too many apps, platforms, and systems. Too many codebases, too much duplicated effort.
The Real Cost of Digital Sprawl
The symptoms are familiar. Development costs multiplied across parallel efforts. Features that exist in one market but not another. Bugs fixed in one app while persisting in three others. Customers juggling multiple apps for the same company. Time to market measured in years instead of months.
The hidden costs are worse. Knowledge fragmented across teams that don't talk to each other. Technical debt accumulating in codebases nobody fully understands. Maintenance burden growing faster than development capacity.
And the opportunity cost nobody calculates. Instead of ten teams independently fixing the same forgot-password bug in ten apps, you could have one team fixing it once and nine teams building features that actually generate revenue.
The path forward is consolidation. Not easy, but necessary.