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Application portfolio rationalization is the act of streamlining the existing application portfolio with an explicit goal of improving efficiency, reducing complexity, and lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) through a myriad of processes.
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Around 70% of organizations do not have referenceable documentation on the current version of their application portfolio. The negative results that stem from this lack of documentation can cost a lot of money. Infosys, a global leader in technology services and consulting reports that Application Rationalization can lead to the cost-saving of more than US $2 million in an enterprise. Currently, 75-80% of IT budgets are spent on operating and managing applications.
Not only is Application Rationalization an effective way to identify capital for reinvestment, it also supports streamlined communication between IT leaders and business personnel.
Application lifecycles vary in their length, and it is quite difficult to keep track of all of them. LeanIX research indicates that large enterprises with more than 1bn euro revenue have an average of 650 applications. The 10% largest have an average of 3400. Not all of these applications are necessarily practical or useful. In order to stay abreast of current innovative trends, provide first-class customer service, reduce cost, and spread operations globally, enterprises benefit from having a tightly integrated application landscape.
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Application Rationalization decreases complexity and lowers IT spend. Numerous studies show that eliminating inefficiencies in the IT landscape can uncover hundreds of millions of dollars in savings.
So , what are the key benefits of Application Rationalization?
After performing Application Rationalization, it is not uncommon to uncover substantial savings. This money can be used to reinvest in innovative endeavors such as IoT, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
With a strong Application Rationalization strategy and continual upkeep in place, an organized landscape will provide the information to negotiate the necessity of future applications.
Symantec reports that by the end of 2016, the average enterprise organization was using 928 cloud apps, up from 841 earlier in the year. Symantec noted in the report: “However, most CIOs think their organizations only use around 30 or 40 cloud apps.” Running an excessive amount of applications can lead to an overly complex landscape, which in turn makes innovation inconceivable.
Once an Application Rationalization project is completed, it will be easy to identify applications that perform similar functions. Consolidating look-alike applications reduces IT spend.
Every application being used at an organization requires some amount of support from vendors or in-house staff. This support costs money. If there are fewer applications to support, there will be less money spent on maintaining these apps. Application Rationalization improves the overall effectiveness of IT by simplifying the application landscape so that organizations are not running redundant applications, overspending on license costs, and investing in unnecessary programs.
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Disengaged stakeholders can destroy your efforts to an efficient and successful Application Rationalization initiative. The ideal way to start engaging them is with a fact-based conversation about to total cost of ownership of the existing applications.
If you have been collecting data on the TCO of applications, you should be able to quickly see where you are able to divest.
Image 1: Application Landscape heat map showing the annual costs of IT components associated with applications.
Source: LeanIX GmbH
In the example above, we can already suspect that we can divest in some applications, for example, we are using "AC Management v1" and "AC Management v2". We also see that the cost associated with version 1 is much higher than with version 2... so my first question would be "why are we using both applications? Would it make sense to only invest in version 2 (which also happens to be cheaper)?".
Your stakeholders probably already know that there are issues in the application portfolio, as a tip, if you do not already have information on the TCO of all of your applications, start by investigating older applications running on legacy systems. These are likely to be hoarding all sorts of resources and are usually a quick win.
If you are looking into Application Rationalization, chances are that you have hundreds of applications... usually that means that simply reducing the number of applications will probably be a win.
In the view below, we re-confirm our suspicion from the previous point. We see that "AC Management v1," has an inappropriate Technical Fit for the company, while its predecessor is adequate. Yet another reason to divest in it.
Image 2: Application landscape showing the technical fit of applications.
Source: LeanIX GmbH
Buying something new is easy, and usually also very exciting. On a weekly basis we try out applications or install new add-on's, use them once, and then completely forget about them. This same behaviour can also be seen happening on a large scale in enterprises and can cause friction against Application Rationalization initiatives.
Try to maximize existing applications before purchasing additional ones. Or, check out what your colleagues on the other side of the globe are using!
For example, in the LeanIX screenshot below we can see that the functional fit of "Personnel System" is Perfect, but only China is using it. So when Brazil decides that they also want an application to manage people, they should ideally use this existing application, instead of investing in a redundant new one.
Image 3: Application Landscape showing the functional fit of applications depending on user groups.
Source: LeanIX GmbH
So, how do we face these challenges? And the most burning question: How do we actually manage to collect all the data?
In this business climate, operating an agile landscape is key. With digital transformation driving customer demand, the IT architecture will need to dynamically adapt to the rapidly changing needs of the market. Most businesses spend 70-80% of their IT budgets on supporting aging low-value legacy applications, leaving very little money to invest in optimizing business processes. The goal of Application Rationalization is to articulate an architectural vision that enables the business goals, responds to the strategic drivers, conforms with the architecture principles and standards, and addresses the stakeholder concerns and objectives. Application Rationalization efforts will help you optimize your application stack, establish transparency between stakeholders, deliver value to the business leaders, dramatically cut cost, and uncover money to invest in trending topics.
Scope and inventory the application portfolio, assessing each by functional fit, technical fit, and lifecycle
Identify opportunities for investment or the decommissioning of redundancies, and deciding on a desired future state technology architecture
Plan and implement the roadmap for success, including key financial metrics and governance.
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