How would you handle discovering that two departments have built conflicting workarounds outside Salesforce for the same problem?

1. Treat both workarounds as evidence. People do not build spreadsheets for entertainment; each one marks a genuine unmet need and shows precisely what the system failed to provide.
2. Document each workaround properly: what it does, who maintains it, what data it holds, how often it is used, and what breaks if it disappears. Shadow systems frequently hold data the official process depends on.
3. Compare the two to find the common underlying requirement. The conflict is usually in the workaround design, not in the need.
4. Assess the risk of leaving them in place — data quality, security, and key-person dependency are the usual concerns — and quantify it, because that is what justifies the investment to replace them.
5. Design the to-be solution to serve the shared need, and plan the decommissioning explicitly. If the workaround is not retired, users will maintain both and the data quality problem gets worse, not better.