It is an odd question to get from a vendor of an EA tool, so let us answer it properly. There are situations where the purchase is waste, and they are not rare.
It is waste when the portfolio is small and the decision-maker is one person. Below roughly thirty applications, with one IT lead who knows them all, a meeting and a spreadsheet beat any tool. The tool only adds maintenance of something the head already holds.
It is waste when nobody owns the data. An EA tool without a register owner and without application owners becomes an expensive, empty database within a year. Tools do not fix ownerlessness; they just make it visible at a higher price.
It is waste when the occasion is an annual wheel or an audit. If the tool is bought to show a map to auditors or at the yearly strategy day, the model dies the day after the presentation. Living models need living decisions to hold on to: renewals, consolidations, AI governance. If those decisions are not on the calendar, there is nothing for the model to live on.
And it is waste when the organisation has no mandate to act on the answers. An overview showing three systems doing the same thing is only worth money if someone can and will retire two of them.
What changes the arithmetic? When more than one person has to trust the truth. When a row of contract renewals is approaching and nobody can say which. When AI systems start appearing in the portfolio and someone must answer where, and at what risk. Then maintained overview becomes cheaper than repeated archaeology.
We sell an EA tool, so read this knowing that. But we have also written down what we do not build, and for the same reason: sometimes the right answer is to wait, and we would rather write that than become another shelf of unused licences.
Read on: What we don't build · Compare · Early access
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Spekir builds the layer that connects strategy to the IT portfolio. See Atlas