Silos or Integrated System

I would like to quote an interesting study which states that most of the organizations do not go beyond implementing base transaction systems.This is after organizations invest a huge amount in procuring and implementing world class systems. So are they not suppose to use it fully ?

In my experience, I have seen very large (20000+) employees organizations that have more than 20 systems in their HR Environment. Now thats a huge number, I always wonder why do organizations invest in a world class solution and why do they still love to live in a multi system environment.(One for HR, One for recruitment etc)

It all begins with legacy that an organization brings along. Lets see how this happens. When an organization is small, they have perhaps got HR as files / excel sheets as medium of storing employee records. However, as the organization grew in scale so did the needs and they decided to get a system on need basis, so if recruitment became a need, IT would design a system to handle it. What happens with this ? systems keep getting added to organization landscape and there is no escaping the fact that overtime with growth in the organization, these systems become unscalable and difficult to manage. However how do organizations do away with something they have been so comfortable with for years ? (Change is not easy).

So today its not uncommon to see hetrogeneous landscape where multiple systems are order of the day. However little is done to finetune the landscape or switch to a single source of truth. Till that happens, multiple versions of employee information would continue to exist and hamper the process of effective decision making and maximizing returns on workforce.