In the face of economic headwinds and rapid change, CIOs are being pressed to deliver more with less. Gartner’s latest CIO Agenda highlights that 57% of CIOs are under pressure to improve workforce productivity, and 52% face pressure to reduce costs. This dual mandate – do things better and do them cheaper – is forcing IT leaders to scrutinise every aspect of their spending.
The good news? A high-performing digital workplace can tackle both challenges at once. By creating an efficient, unified environment, especially leveraging the tools many organisations already pay for in Microsoft 365 – companies can unlock productivity gains while eliminating redundant expenses.
Most enterprises have accumulated a large stack of digital tools over the years, for collaboration, messaging, file-sharing, task management, analytics, and more. On paper, each tool might serve a niche need. But in practice, too many tools can create chaos instead of efficiency.
Case study example: Before its transformation, Robert Walters – a global recruitment consultancy – had over 350 different business applications in use, with data sprawled across 3,000+ SharePoint sites. Employees found it incredibly difficult to find what they needed or know where to pay attention. Important updates were getting lost in the noise. This was a major impetus for change.
If tool overload is the problem, consolidation is the cure. Specifically, consolidating into a well-integrated Microsoft 365 digital workplace can address both the productivity and cost problems in one stroke. The rationale is simple:
Microsoft 365 E3/E5 licenses come with a vast array of capabilities. Messaging, calls/meetings (Teams), content collaboration (SharePoint, OneDrive), project management (Planner, Project), process automation (Power Platform), enterprise social (Viva Engage), analytics (Power BI), and more – not to mention security and device management. By fully leveraging these, businesses can get rid of multiple standalone tools. Within the communications space alone, there may be legacy tools in use for newsletter production, video creation and broadcast comms – all of which are now out of the box.
Forrester found that a composite 30,000-employee company was able to eliminate redundant licenses in categories like video conferencing, cloud storage, and security by standardising on Microsoft 365, yielding £46 per user per month in cost savings. For 30k users, that’s over £15 million/year saved just on software spend. Even if your environment is smaller, the per-user savings of consolidating tools is significant – why pay for Zoom, Slack and Box, when you already have Teams, Viva and OneDrive?
With Teams as a central hub (integrating chats, meetings, files, and many app plug-ins), work becomes less about jumping between destinations and more about bringing the work to one place. This directly reduces the time wasted on app toggling and searching.
In Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study, organisations reported end-users saved 70+ hours per year each thanks to the improved collaboration and integrated workflows in Microsoft 365 (Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive). Essentially, that’s ~3-4% of an employee’s working hours returned to productive tasks – a boost that can translate into millions of pounds of value for large enterprises.
Perhaps most importantly, consolidating on Microsoft 365 means meeting people in the tools they already use every day. Chances are, your employees already live in Outlook, Teams and Office. Delivering a modern intranet or digital workplace built within this ecosystem (for example, using SharePoint and Viva Connections to surface content in Teams) will be more accessible and familiar to employees as a result – as the Robert Walters project success metrics demonstrate following their move to SharePoint from Workplace by Facebook.
This is perhaps why standalone intranet platforms with their own logic and interface often suffer from low levels of employee adoption.
When everything is integrated, content and tools are intuitively found in the flow of work.
Building a high-performing digital workplace on Microsoft 365 is about using what you have to its full potential. In times when every investment must show value, this approach delivers a win-win.
You achieve cost savings by cutting out redundant software and infrastructure. One firm’s move to M365 resulted in a 197% ROI over three years, much of it from vendor and infrastructure consolidation. Even beyond licenses, consider the real estate of your IT budget: simplifying the toolset can postpone hardware upgrades, reduce support tickets by 45%, and trim travel or outsourcing costs via better remote collaboration and automation. These efficiencies drop straight to the bottom line.
At the same time, you’re improving employee experience. A digital workplace that is fast, seamless, and helpful reduces frustration and burnout. It empowers people to do their jobs without battling technology. In an era where attracting and retaining tech talent is critical, having a modern, unified digital workplace is a selling point. There’s also a flexibility gain: when new needs arise, you can often configure or extend your existing M365 environment instead of procuring something new.
Consolidating now sets you up for the next wave of innovation. Many organisations are eyeing the promise of AI (like Microsoft 365 Copilot and other AI assistants) to further boost productivity. These AI tools work best when they have broad access to your organisation’s knowledge and communication – which is much easier if your data and activity live in one integrated cloud platform. By streamlining onto M365, CIOs not only solve today’s problems but also build the connective tissue for AI and analytics to thrive.
For CIOs and IT leaders navigating the dual mandate of boosting performance and trimming costs, the digital workplace is a prime candidate for optimisation. The research is clear that scattered, siloed toolsets come with heavy hidden costs – both in money and in employee time. On the flip side, organisations that have consolidated their digital workplace onto Microsoft 365’s platform are seeing meaningful productivity gains (dozens of hours saved per employee per year) and substantial cost savings from software rationalisation and operational efficiencies.
A high-performing digital workplace isn’t a luxury for better times – it’s a path to survive and thrive in today’s challenging environment. By simplifying your digital toolset and doubling down on platforms that drive integration (like M365), you create a virtuous cycle: employees get more done with less hassle, IT spends less time and money managing complexity, and the organisation as a whole becomes more agile and resilient. In the journey to do more with less, sometimes less (fewer apps, fewer silos) really is more.
The expectations on CIOs and CTOs have never been higher, and the resource constraints have never been tighter. Our Microsoft 365 experts work directly with technology leaders to identify where immediate impact improvements can be unlocked.
If you want a clear plan to reduce spend and maximise the tools your employees already use, reach out to our team today.
