FEATURE: PROACTIVE SECURITY
How CIOs can fight tool fatigue and boost productivity in the digital workplace
With CIOs facing growing pressure as employees drown in apps, logins and context switches, Nigel Davies, Managing Director and Co-founder at digital workplace platform Claromentis, says a single digital hub is the pragmatic fix.
Burnout has dominated headlines for years, and with good reason. Yet alongside heavy workloads, a quieter fatigue has seeped into many organisations: exhaustion caused not by the volume of work but by the number of tools required to operate day-to-day.
Everyday tasks often require hopping between a chat app, document repository, learning portal, policy site, HR system and specialist platforms.
Each hop introduces friction; every login adds delay. Whole days dissolve into strings of micro-actions that barely result in real progress. Employees feel the constant drag on their attention. CIOs inherit the cost, shoulder the support burden and, when adoption falters, absorb the blame from all sides.
Why fragmentation breaks the employee experience
The digital workplace is no longer an accessory to“ real” work; in many instances, it is the workplace itself. When activities fragment across a patchwork of platforms, the employee experience fractures too. New starters struggle to find the basics. Managers chase updates across unconnected portals. Compliance teams cannot reliably see who has read a policy, completed a course or acknowledged a change. Businesses buy modern tools but receive outdated results. This is not solely a technology problem, nor just a process or culture problem; it is all three, tightly woven together. Because the causes are practical, the fix can be practical too.
The single front door
The remedy is simple to describe: create one hub for everyday work and use it to orchestrate, not eliminate, specialist systems. When communication, knowledge, learning, compliance and core workflows sit behind a single front door, tool sprawl recedes and tool fatigue loses its grip. The hub routes work to the right specialist systems. Experts keep their tools. Everyone else gets a calmer, faster day.
How small frictions become a big problem
Fatigue persists because it accumulates as a thousand small frictions that seem trivial in isolation but corrosive in aggregate. People must relearn controls with every app. Notifications appear in different places. Access breaks, permissions drift and IT gets another“ please
Nigel Davies, Managing Director and Co-founder, Claromentis
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