Expanding on Judy Ko’s blog on Why Applications Don’t Matter, IT organizations should look at eliminating their applications. They should review their application portfolio and determine the business value of each application, especially those that are inherited from acquired companies. Many of these legacy applications are rarely accessed, either because the relevant data has been migrated to another application or the entire application has become obsolete, and the data is only useful for compliance audit purposes. In this case, they should think about retiring these applications and shutting down all the infrastructures associated with it.

Why keep around applications when you no longer use it, except on one-off occasions? According to Forrester, “Streamlining the existing application portfolio is a necessary step for organizations that have been in existence for a decade or more, especially if those organizations intend to evolve to SOA—why carry all that baggage forward to the next computing paradigm? Only some legacy applications will be reusable, and some aren’t fit for anything but retirement—but how can you tell which is which? Why waste money maintaining applications that aren’t worth keeping? Why not redirect that money to where it will benefit the organization?”¹

The tough part is determining which applications to retire. There may be a few straggling business users who are still holding on to some archaic application. The questions you need to ask are:

· How many people are using the application?

· Who is using it? Which department?

· How often are they using it?

· How are they using it – are they still actively changing the data or are they just using it for reporting purposes?

· Is this data representing active business entities, or is it historical information?

· Has most of the data been migrated to another application? Does the data exist in one or more redundant applications?

If there are few people who are using the application, all of the data is no longer modified, and they represent old, inactive transactions, or if there is another application holding the same data, then the application has low business value and is a candidate for decommissioning.

Think about the amount you can save by retiring a legacy application! Here are some of the cost savings you can achieve:

· Server, CPU utilization

· Expensive, high end storage

· Database license and maintenance cost

· Application maintenance cost

· Power consumption

· IT staff who operate and maintain the application

I have seen as much as 75% of full time equivalents (FTE) being saved by retiring legacy applications. And this is very significant considering some of these IT staff may have very specialized skill sets and are highly paid. These highly paid, skilled IT staff can be reassigned to more critical projects that require their expertise, and you can avoid the need to hire additional staff. The cost savings potential is enormous. So the next time you need to cut cost in your IT budget, think about all of the applications in your environment. Which ones are rarely used or are used only by few people? As long as you can retain and access the data easily and cost-effectively for compliance and reporting purposes, why keep the application around? It is truly not the application that matters, but the data that matters. Keep the data and maintain access to it, then you can eliminate the application and all the cost associated with it.

1 Phil Murphy, “Got Legacy? Four fates awaits your applications,” Trends, Forrester Research, January 10, 2006, p. 2.

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