Situation: Duplicate, Obsolete, and Underutilized Applications

Situation: Duplicate, Obsolete, and Underutilized Applications

Interestingly, applications also go through ageing process, reproduce, and also compete with each other. It is often that organization in such a process, possess applications that are underutilized because these do not meet functional needs of business users, develop duplicate functionality due to lack of integration and information architecture, get obsolete due to obsolete technology platform and performance issues and develop duplicates due to non visibility of applications inventory etc. A timely rationalization is must to identify such applications and decommission those that does not provide differentiated value to business
It is estimated that most of the large organization have at least 20%-25% applications that can be decommissioned through rationalization process.

Benefits:
· Lower cost of support and maintenance
· Optimal utilization of infrastructure and resources
· Standardization
· Leaner portfolio leading to effective APM(Applications Portfolio Management)

Questions to identify improvement areas
1. Does application inventory exist and maintained in the organization?
2. Is applications dependency document available and up to date, to know how information is shared?
3. Has IT gone through the process of portfolio rationalization?
4. Are there applications that business users think are not meeting business needs?
5. Are there applications on legacy and unsupported technology platform?

The challange is multifolds while assessing applications portfolio. Functional fiteness and technical fitness must be looked in view of applications' strategic fitness. Some of the applications that may appear duplicate may contain some niche business rules and compliance aspects that must be retained to secure intellectual property.

Once applications are classified for retiring, the next challange is 'How'. retiring an application might prove difficult than adopting or building a new one as it may contain compliance, legal, customer, suppliers etc. centric data which may need to be referred and retained for a period of time. Pharmaceutical and financial industry applications are such examples.