Zombie Systems Are Draining Your Budget

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Zombie Systems Are Draining Your Budget

Podcast Episode · Process Debt · 05/23/2025 · 13m

Ever look at your credit card and realize you’re still paying for an app you haven’t opened since last spring? Now scale that to the size of a company. What feels like a $9.99 nuisance in your personal life becomes a line-item vampire in your P&L.

We see it everywhere. Small teams running on dozens of tools. Big companies cruising near three hundred. Not evil. Just… undead. The licenses renew. The integrations linger. The data sits in cold storage because no one wants to be the person who turns the switch off and loses something important.

Outlook can do tasks. But the team lives in monday.com. Jira can run the whole show. But someone bought an add-on for the last 20 percent, then used 5 percent of that. Marketing has HubSpot, but the actual campaigns run in something else. So you keep both. And you keep the inertia.

The wild part isn’t the spending. It’s the cognitive drag. Every new tool brings a login, a vocabulary, and a maintenance tax. Then another team arrives with a favorite. Then a new leader arrives with a mandate. Now you have years of reporting systems layered like tree rings.

Zombie systems don’t eat brains. They nibble margins. A little here. A little there. The cost is rarely the sticker price. It’s the time you lose learning, reconciling, and defending a stack that grew without intention.

The cure starts with definition. Tools need owners and jobs. If a system has no accountable human, it will decay. If it has no explicit job, it will sprawl. Simple rules help:

1. Name the job. “CRM is for pipeline and forecast. Not project plans. Not support tickets.” If the job isn’t written down, it doesn’t exist.

2. Name the owner. One person who cares about adoption, hygiene, and value. Their job is not to push data in. It’s to pull value out. If your team enters information but never gets an hour back in saved effort or smarter decisions, the system is failing.

3. Consolidate to 80 percent. If your platform covers most of the need, use it. Resist the siren song of a perfect edge case. Niche tools multiply complexity. Complexity multiplies cost.

4. Sunset with courage. Archive the data. Document where it lives. Turn off the renewal. If you are afraid to kill it, schedule a shutdown drill. Put a date on the calendar and make the change reversible for thirty days. Most of the time, no one screams.

5. Make “Fix-It Friday” real. Every week, pick one thing to learn or simplify in a system your team already uses. One saved click. One better query. One new automation. You don’t need a transformation program. You need compounding wins.

And here’s the hidden trap: don’t assume technical fluency equals process fluency. A developer can master an IDE and still run a sloppy stand-up. A marketer can automate emails and still fragment the customer record. Teach the process, not just the tool.

You don’t have to outrun every zombie. You just have to stop feeding them. Start with definition, ownership, and one small improvement this Friday. Then do it again next Friday.

Process Debt Truth: Most tools fail not because they’re weak, but because no one owns the job of turning data entry into daily value.