What the office stack costs before the next digital step.

Anonymised composite. Identifying names, brands, shafts, towns, and vendors beyond commodity categories are withheld. Headcount and counts are rounded.

The situation

Finance could see Microsoft invoices. IT could see licence counts. Neither could show which seats were unused, which tools did the same job twice, and which of that spend was about to be topped up by a digital programme.

The office ran on Microsoft 365: email, Teams, SharePoint. Around it sat a second meeting tool, a second document platform, extra reporting packs, and planning tools that lived in Excel as often as in the paid product. People left. Contractors rotated. Licences stayed. Dollar-priced seats, paid in rand.

Leadership wanted to raise digital maturity. They did not want another programme on a portfolio they could not see. The first job was cost and optimisation. Transformation could wait until it was a decision, not a slogan.

Questions the current-state had to answer

• What are we paying for Microsoft 365 and the office applications around it?
• Which seats are unused, duplicated, or over-licensed?
• Which tools do the same job twice?
• What can we stop paying before we fund the next digital step?
• How do we raise digital maturity without buying another layer on an unmapped stack?

What we did

The expeditionary team led a current-state of the office applications, the work they support, cost, and risk. Architecture and finance specialists, working with best-fit tools that complements existing tools, turned that into a living picture leadership could query.

The CA(SA) and Advisor | CFO seats put unused seats and duplicate tools in rand, not in a licence report. Architecture as a Service kept the model living, so a true-up or a digital ask could be tested against the portfolio as it stood, not against a binder from last year. Plant and underground control stayed out of scope on purpose.

What became visible

Unused and over-licensed seats. Leavers, contractors, and shared accounts still on paid Microsoft 365. A band of licences above what the work needed.

Duplicate office tools. A second meeting tool and a second document platform next to Teams and SharePoint. Reporting packs that overlapped.

A digital ask on an uncounted portfolio. The transformation proposal would have added spend before the dark licences were cut.

A cautious path. Cost out first. Then one measured step on digital maturity, against the living picture, not a new stack.

Outcome

Inside the first operating quarter on the living picture, unused Microsoft 365 seats and the duplicate meeting-and-document stack were approved for cut or consolidation before the next true-up. The digital programme was recast as a smaller, sequenced lift in maturity: standardise on what they already paid for, then add only what the living picture said was missing.

Exact rands stay confidential. The shape of the result is the point: about 2,000 people on an office software portfolio, with a rand figure on waste, and a next digital step leadership could stand behind.

Time-to-value sat on the Architecture as a Service path: current-state, living picture, extract. Not an 18-month binder.

Cost management · Architecture as a Service · Application rationalisation case study