As businesses grow and evolve, they add software and systems to manage departments, automate processes and provide insights into operations. It’s rarely, however, done holistically, with long range goals in mind. The end result is frequently a “hairball” of disparate systems, loosely connected with brittle integrations that demand attention with every upgradeor tweak. The emergence of cloud-based applications and Software-as-a-Service hasn’t eliminated the hairball, it’s just moved it to the cloud. In fact, the cloud’s low upfront costs that facilitate departmental purchases without oversight from IT or costly hardware investments sometimes makes it worse. It doesn’t have to be that way.