Technology - Application rationalisation

Every organisation faces the challenge of maximising their return on investment in IT applications. However, the speed of technology advancements and the rapid pace of today's business environment often force companies to rely on an application long after it has ceased to provide maximum value to the business. Such an application becomes increasingly costly to the business and impedes IT productivity because of its complexity and constant support requirements.

Rationalisation addresses low-value applications from a business point of view. Using objective measures, it identifies the under-performing assets within the application portfolio and, depending on their situation, restores them to profitability or decommissions them to save funds and free resources. It provides executives with the information they need to eliminate "pet" applications that pull staff, budget, and attention from higher value objectives, and the services and expertise to cost-effectively extend the life and increase the ROI of still-valuable applications.

Rationalisation encompasses four major tasks

Analyse the portfolio - analyse the state of the applications within the IT portfolio in order to understand their current condition, quantify their cost of operation and support, and measure their value to the business. This information identifies each application's lifecycle positioning, calculates the opportunity for improvement, and determines the actions needed to optimise the application's business effectiveness. It creates a prioritised action list to maximise the benefit of rationalisation investments.
Eliminate redundant applications - identify overlapping functionality and determine the strongest application which is to remain. If necessary, it harvests discrete functionality from the redundant applications and incorporates it into the strongest application to ensure functional coverage.
Retire end-of-life applications - an application reaches the end of its useful life when its cost of operation and support approaches or exceeds the business value it produces. Without a portfolio analysis to measure costs and value, an end-of-life application can drain IT resources for years before it is noticed and retired. In cases where the original business purpose still has merit, the best strategy may be to develop a new application operating on a less costly and more strategic platform to replace the aged one.
Renovate worthwhile applications - where appropriate, targeted improvements can extend the life and restore the value of an under-performing application. Migrating an application from a non-core technology to a newer, more strategic platform extends the application's useful life by enhancing its flexibility and scalability while saving the cost of supporting the older platform. Improving the technical quality of an application enhances its maintainability, reducing costs, and improving extensibility. Depending on an application's functional quality, its business value can be improved through functional enhancements, or pertinent functionality can be extracted and moved to a newer application. Once worthwhile applications are restored, additional value can be obtained by integrating otherwise disparate applications within the organisation's strategic architecture.