The hidden cost of fragmented systems

Fragmentation rarely announces itself as a crisis. It appears as small inconveniences: duplicate data entry, manual reconciliation, delayed updates, parallel spreadsheets maintained "just in case."

Individually, these seem tolerable. Collectively, they form an invisible tax on decision-making.

When every team optimizes locally, the global system becomes harder to understand. Leaders compensate by adding more reporting, which often increases the fragmentation it tries to control.

The real cost is not time. It is cognitive load. People spend energy navigating the system instead of improving it.

Modernization should aim first at coherence, not speed.