Every organization is drowning in documents, dashboards, reports, presentations, and data apps. On the surface, they seem like everyday tasks: generating a report, updating a presentation, sharing insights, or publishing a form. But underneath that routine lies a silent crisis – a death by a thousand cuts.
Each step in creating, managing, and distributing data-rich content is fragmented, inefficient, and full of invisible waste. Studies and internal audits repeatedly show that between 50% and 80% of the effort involved in this process is lost due to tool switching, rework, formatting, bottlenecks, and integration challenges. Let’s break down the five key contributors to this chronic inefficiency.
1. Too Many Tools for Similar Tasks
One of the most obvious signs of systemic inefficiency is the proliferation of tools. One team uses Google Docs, another uses Word. Reports live in Excel, dashboards in Tableau, forms in Typeform, and presentations in PowerPoint or Canva. Meanwhile, analytics and content management are spread across yet another set of platforms.
Each of these tools is optimized for a single purpose but our content today is cross-functional by nature. A modern insight document might include visualizations, interactive filters, commentary, linked forms, and even embedded workflows. But instead of building one unified artifact, we end up stitching together five different tools.
This fragmentation means duplicate work, inconsistent formatting, and extra steps just to keep things aligned. It’s like trying to build a house with five architects who don’t talk to each other.
2. Content Scattered Across Formats
It’s not just that tools are fragmented. It’s that formats don’t talk to each other. You might start with a spreadsheet of data, summarize it in a slide deck, convert that into a PDF for distribution, and then repackage it as a webpage or portal entry. Each of these formats has different capabilities and limitations.
Worse, updates ripple inefficiently. A change in the source data means you now have to update the chart in Excel, the slide in PowerPoint, the table in the PDF, and the webpage content. Multiply this by every update, every team, and every customer touchpoint, and you quickly realize how much time and accuracy are lost.
3. Manual Steps Slow Everything Down
Even with templates and automation, much of today’s document and data content production is deeply manual. Teams spend hours copying charts, reformatting slides, adjusting margins, and rewording for different audiences. Data needs to be cleaned, transformed, and inserted often by hand.
Publishing is no better. Reports are emailed manually. PDFs are uploaded to portals. Dashboards are shared behind login walls with access controls that need IT intervention. What should be a fluid, dynamic process is more like a slow assembly line full of human bottlenecks.
The result? High latency, high labor costs, and delayed decisions.
4. Data Apps Are Hard to Build and Scale
The modern answer to information overload is to “build an app.” But this creates a new kind of pain. Building a data app requires developers, backend infrastructure, API integrations, user experience design, testing, deployment, and maintenance. Most organizations simply don’t have the bandwidth.
Even when apps get built, they’re hard to adapt for new use cases. Scaling requires more code, more servers, more approvals. Meanwhile, the users just want something simple, portable, and interactive without all the baggage.
This gap between what users need and what IT can deliver is one of the biggest hidden costs in the entire content lifecycle.
5. Time, Budget, and IT Capacity Get Drained Silently
All of these “small” inefficiencies add up. They waste time often doubling or tripling the effort needed to produce data-rich content. They waste budget paying for multiple tools, consultants, and cloud services that overlap in function. And they burn out IT teams who are stuck managing fragmented workflows, permission issues, and tool integrations.
The tragedy is not that the work isn’t getting done – it is. The tragedy is that we’re doing it the hard way, every time. A thousand small cuts that bleed out our productivity and innovation.
The Case for a New Model
We need a new model – one that unifies documents, data, and apps into a single, streamlined format. A model where content is interactive by default, where updates flow automatically, and where the same asset can live on the web, in an email, or as a download without being recreated from scratch.
That model is here. It’s called the InfoApp: the offspring of document and app thinking. A way to build and share rich, interactive content without the cost and complexity of traditional apps.
By addressing the root causes of these inefficiencies, InfoApps can eliminate the thousand cuts and restore sanity to how we work with information.