Your catalogue is your strategy - whether you intended it or not

When organisations talk about workplace strategy, they usually talk about roadmaps, standards, and principles.

Employees experience something else.

They experience the catalogue.

What they can order.

What they cannot.

How easy it is.

And how much guidance they are given.

Whether leadership intends it or not, the catalogue is where strategy becomes real.

The catalogue debate always starts with computers

In most organisations, catalogue discussions begin with laptops.

And very quickly, they get stuck on keyboard layouts.

Should every possible keyboard variant be offered?

Should there be one global standard?

Should local preferences always win?

This is where I am often not the most popular person in the room.

I am a strong advocate for employee experience. But experience must be balanced with scale, reuse, and manageability. In practice, I typically recommend landing on five to eight keyboard variants for a global enterprise.

That usually covers the vast majority of needs.

I am Danish. I work perfectly fine on a UK Euro keyboard. I can also work on a Nordic keyboard. For me, productivity is driven far more by having the right device, the right configuration, and the right setup - not by having an unlimited set of options.

When organisations start with too many keyboard variants, the downstream impact is immediate. Forecasting becomes less accurate. Stock cannot be shared across countries. Reuse becomes harder. Cost increases quietly across logistics, warehousing, and lifecycle management.

Once again, it comes down to finding the sweet spot.

Poor personas lead to poor catalogues

As I have touched on earlier in this series, weak persona modelling almost always results in weak catalogue design.

Most enterprises eventually manage to lock down their computer catalogue reasonably well. Three to five models. A set of keyboard variants. A few monitors. A dock. Some accessories. Done.

But this narrow focus misses a much bigger opportunity.

Catalogues should be broader and deeper. Not to increase choice, but to increase consistency.

Smartphones.

Tablets.

Operational technology such as Zebra or Honeywell devices.

Yes, some of these categories come with local complexity, especially around telecoms. But avoiding them altogether simply pushes decisions into the shadows.

Standardisation goes beyond devices

The real value of a mature catalogue is not just what is ordered. It is what comes with it.

Standardised catalogues make it possible to standardise:

• services attached to devices

• asset tagging and identification

• CMDB registration in ServiceNow

• goods receipt processes

• invoice reconciliation and financial controls

This is where supplier rationalisation becomes measurable, shadow spending is reduced, and governance improves without adding friction for employees.

Most organisations underestimate how many of these opportunities exist.

Employees do not want infinite choice

One of the biggest misconceptions I encounter is that employee experience improves with more choice.

In reality, most employees want guidance.

They want to know that what they receive will work.

They want to be productive quickly.

They want confidence that the setup is fit for purpose.

A well-designed catalogue does not limit people. It enables them.

Choice without guidance creates friction.

Standards with intent create trust.

Vendor sprawl is a symptom, not the disease

Vendor sprawl rarely happens because of bad intent.

It happens because no one is looking.

Gartner describes this exact pattern in How Procurement Leaders Can Optimize Costs by Consolidating Supplier Spread. The research highlights that unmanaged supplier proliferation is rarely driven by strategic choice, but by fragmented governance, unclear standards, and unmanaged tail spend.

Gartner is explicit that when approved catalogues and buying channels are weak or incomplete, maverick purchasing fills the gaps. Not out of rebellion, but out of necessity. The outcome is predictable: cost leakage, duplicated vendors, inconsistent data, and elevated operational risk at scale.

When there is no clear global catalogue or policy, decisions drift to local teams. Local budgets are optimised. Local preferences are satisfied. Enterprise impact is rarely considered.

Over time, the organisation ends up with more vendors, more contracts, more processes, and more cost - all justified locally, and all suboptimal globally.

At the end of the day, it is the same company treasury funding all of it.

Closing perspective

Workplace catalogues are rarely neutral.

Every option included, excluded, or left undefined shapes behaviour across the organisation. It influences cost, sustainability, reuse, support effort, and employee confidence long before anyone notices it in a report.

Whether intended or not, the catalogue is already making decisions on behalf of leadership.

The only real question is whether those decisions are deliberate.