The hidden cost of fragmented workplace technology

Corporates are juggling an average 17 different technology platforms to run their real estate operations. Each platform usually purchased for good reason – a slick visitor management system here, a space booking tool there, another for maintenance tracking. But what seemed like sensible decisions at the time are adding up to something more problematic than these organisations anticipated.

Security gaping might be a bit extreme control over when critical features get built, employee friction when switching between systems, and executive decision-making based on data cobbled together from multiple sources can explain why facilities teams are spending more time managing technology than buildings.

"Companies unnecessarily expose themselves to risk and may not even realise the until something goes wrong....or they need the technology to pivot to align with an organisational need or strategy" says Michael Taggart, executive director, client growth and technology, APAC, JLL.

For Taggart, the security implications of a fragmented tech landscape are the most alarming. Every new vendor platform introduces another potential entry point for breaches and requires continuous assessment and compliance monitoring. For organisations handling sensitive data, this creates an escalating risk that grows with every new system.

If you're a large organisation with north of 25000 employees and deploying solutions across tens of thousands of devices – many of them employee-owned – every additional system amplifies your exposure," he observes.

A breach in visitor management exposes building access data, employee movements and client visits. Meanwhile, each system requires its own security protocols, vendor audits and incident response planning. The challenge intensifies when solutions come from smaller vendors which, despite delivering innovative functionality, may lack the security infrastructure that enterprise platforms maintain as standard.

Fragmented estates also remove organisations' ability to develop capabilities synched to their own needs and timelines. Instead, they become dependent on whether and when their vendors choose to build required features.

The problem intensifies with smaller vendors. These technology companies often commit to ambitious development schedules to secure contracts but typically operate with constrained resources and limited networks of system integration partners.

"Without a broad network of integration partners to help them scale, the custom support organisations rely on can be difficult for smaller vendors to maintain," Taggart explains. "When they win new business, they must divide their focus to service those accounts as well."

On the other hand, consolidated platforms supported by established system integrators such as ServiceNow or AWS, can build required capabilities immediately, regardless of when the platform vendor schedules that feature for release.

"It's about aligning your organisation's needs with the product, not aligning the product's development priorities with what you need," Taggart says.

The productivity impact affects every employee who interacts with workplace systems. A facilities coordinator checking visitor registrations in one system, booking meeting rooms in another and generating occupancy reports from a fourth experiences constant friction. Employees booking desks, IT staff managing integrations, finance teams reconciling invoices and managers generating reports all navigate this fragmented landscape where straightforward tasks require switching between applications that cannot share data.

Training costs multiply across different systems, IT helpdesks get flooded with support tickets for different applications, and 58% of organisations now cite managing multiple disconnected data dashboards as their single biggest analytical challenge, according to the workplace management platform Eptura. This administrative drag forces 37% of organisations to dedicate 11 or more full-time employees solely to manual data collation and reporting. It also explains why facilities teams now spend nearly half their time on manual tasks that should be automated.

"When space utilisation data lives in one system and maintenance costs in another, creating even basic combined analyses requires hours of manual work that introduces errors and delays. This means you're defending multimillion-dollar real estate budgets with incomplete information," Taggart says.

But the ultimate cost of fragmentation is that organisations end up paying for real estate they do not actually need. When databases cannot talk to each other, companies lose track of actual usage. A study in JLL's Global Occupancy Planning Benchmark Report 2026 highlights a global pharmaceutical firm that consolidated its separate space and firm did not need new, specialised application, they just needed to consolidate into one so the system and data was inherintly integrated.

Before procuring another specialised workplace application, organisations should assess the full lifecycle cost: ongoing security management across multiple vendors, loss of strategic control over capability development, and the productivity impact across the entire workforce. Consolidating workplace functions onto established enterprise platforms addresses all three challenges while maintaining the functionality that specialist solutions promise.

"When we talk to organisations across the region, they are often struggling with the sheer volume of manual coordination," says Shimin Lim, director, client growth and technology, APAC, JLL. "Bringing these separate datasets together under a single, consolidated platform saves money on software licensing and frees the team from administrative gridlock so they can focus on strategic business enablement."

For an assessment of your workplace technology architecture, contact the JLL Technology Advisory team here.