Chief Information Officers (CIOs) must manage business and IT applications as assets. The applications must have a positive return on investment (ROI) in order to justify their existence. The business value for computing the ROI may consists of productivity, revenue, regulatory compliance, and mission criticality.
With increasing budget constraints and rapid technology innovation, IT leaders are under increasing pressure to manage their application portfolio efficiently while leveraging modern technologies. Outdated, obsolete, and redundant legacy applications stifle IT innovation. Business surveys show that legacy IT systems are not only inhibiting IT departments’ modernization efforts, but are also threatening to curtail business improvement and growth.
Application Rationalization is an analytical approach to decisions about maintaining, upgrading, modernizing, and retiring applications. Organizations can use it to free-up IT resources from unused, redundant, and “high maintenance” legacy applications and create an effective roadmap for each application and modernization project pipeline. Application Rationalization also prepares the application portfolio for valuable IT initiatives, such as digital signature, identity management, and cloud migration (Platform-as-a-service or Software-as-a-service).
NISH’s approach to Application Rationalization is pragmatic and based on industry best practices. Our approach includes the following recommended activities:
- Obtain executive and upper management sponsorship, especially from the business.
- Establish and communicate goals with clearly defined milestones (aka project plan).
- Assemble a team of business and IT analysts, IT architects, cost analysts, and project manager.
- Adopt a methodology (including evaluation criteria) and transparent process.
- Identify and engage both business and IT stakeholders throughout the process.
- Use one tool to collect and analyze data.
- Communicate regularly and frequently.