Many organisations have amassed a plethora of IT systems and applications over time, usually in response to emerging market requirements where meeting deadlines took precedence over application re-use and platform decommissioning.
Whilst each individual decision made sense at the time, the cumulative effect means that they now now find themselves with large estates which are complex and very costly to maintain. In addition, other factors such as change of ownership and merger/acquisition serve to compound the problem. As a result, it is not uncommon to find businesses operating with overly complex architectures.
Reversing this situation is rarely straightforward as services have many interdependencies and cannot simply be switched off. Developing a clear understanding of the current estate, an agreed target and a strategy to achieve this is needed. Most importantly this should be underpinned with a well structured programme focused on Application Consolidation to execute the strategy.
