We like to think of the IT landscape as a sunny garden in which ideas have everything they need to thrive. This article shows how six familiar ‘weeds’ use up available space. It also explains how to create the conditions for everyday innovation to flourish.

When everyday work overshadows innovation

IT complexity is a natural side effect of your company’s growth. Your teams need quick fixes to solve urgent business problems. They might connect multiple applications or adjust an ERP process to meet a new compliance requirement. Those changes start to add up. Outdated systems, custom ERP code, fragmented data, and an unstable foundation make people wary of change. Inflexible workflows encourage workarounds that soon become ‘the way we do things’, while overworked IT teams spend their time and budget keeping the lights on. This combination leaves little room to challenge the status quo or test better ways of working.

Innovation always involves some risk. But the risk shouldn’t come from worrying about whether your IT landscape is stable or user-focused enough, or whether your people have enough time to cultivate good new ideas.

Six weeds: The IT problems that block innovation

Here are six common complexity-related issues that act like weeds in your IT landscape. They suck up resources and make useful change slower, costlier, and harder to sustain:

• Outdated systems: Teams export order, stock, or customer data from legacy applications into spreadsheets, enter it again elsewhere or wait for overnight reports before acting. A new customer portal, automated process, or service model requires manual data transfers or costly integration work before teams can test it properly.
• Changes to standard ERP code: Teams have added custom ERP logic for things like specific tax calculations, pricing models, billing processes, or approval requirements. Each upgrade requires them to trace dependencies and retest calculations, approval paths, and connected reports. Unclear dependencies raise costs, extend delivery times, and discourage experiments that touch core processes.
• Overworked IT: IT spends much of its capacity fixing broken interfaces, managing access requests, producing bespoke reports and maintaining one-off processes. Business teams wait for technical support, while IT has limited time to design and test low-code applications, automation, or specific AI use cases.
• Fragmented data: Sales, finance, and operations use different customer, product, order, or margin definitions across ERP, customer relationship management systems, and spreadsheets. Teams spend each pilot reconciling figures and correcting inputs. Automation and AI tools then produce inconsistent outputs instead of supporting faster decisions or better services.
• Unstable ERP foundation: A pilot works with sample data, but live testing exposes duplicate records, inconsistent master data, unreliable interfaces, missing access controls, or slow transaction processing. Teams cannot move the idea into daily operations without further data repair, manual checks, and technical work. The experiment never delivers a dependable business benefit.
• Inflexible systems and workflows: Launching a subscription offer, opening a location, or integrating an acquisition requires new fields, approval chains, manual hand-offs, and spreadsheet trackers. Each change adds support work and delays the launch, leaving teams with less capacity to develop the next service, product, or market opportunity.

Cleaning up your landscape: 5 tips for success

Every organisation reaches a point where the layers of IT complexity need to be cleaned out to make room for innovation and new growth. In our years supporting growing companies in that process, this is what the most successful companies get right:

1. Define the business value first

Start with a specific outcome, such as faster order processing, simpler reporting, or a new self-service option. Agree how you will measure success and identify the smallest useful test before selecting the technology.

2. Keep routine processes standard

Use your ERP, such as SAP Cloud ERP, as the system of record for routine finance, purchasing and order processes. Preserve customisation where it supports a legal requirement or a genuinely distinctive business model. IT can then spend less time tracing dependencies and more time supporting valuable ideas.

3. Build a dependable data foundation

Agree on shared definitions for customer, product, order, and financial data, then assign clear owners. A single source of truth gives teams reliable inputs for reporting, automation, and well-defined AI applications. Pilots can focus on business value instead of correcting figures.

4. Give each idea the right place

Keep stable processes in the system of record. Place adaptable customer portals and low-code applications in Systems of Differentiation. Use systems of innovation for early pilots that require rapid testing. Teams can explore ideas without prematurely changing standard ERP processes.

5. Make innovation a shared routine

Bring the process owner, IT, and the relevant data owner together at the start. Define the outcome, required data, essential controls, and smallest useful test. Review the evidence together, then improve, scale, or stop the idea.

Why not enable your teams to innovate?

A clean core and dependable data foundation give your teams’ everyday improvements a practical route to business value.

Download our free whitepaper, Letting innovation thrive: How your ERP and data help good ideas take root, to explore the clean core and data foundation behind everyday innovation.