Application Rationalization

the action of making IT more efficient, especially by dispensing with superfluous spending on applications

IT investments are steadily growing in many organizations resulting in increase in number of deployed applications. As the portfolio of applications grow and consume increasing amount of IT budget, organization needs to evaluate whether these applications are meeting business needs and if these applications are running on the right technology stack. This process is called application rationalization.

the action of making IT more efficient, especially by dispensing with superfluous spending on applications

Application Rationalization process steps:

1. Select candidate application e.g. applications in a portfolio or applications related to a business capability

2. Define criteria for business and technical scores

3. Identify stakeholders who will answer the questionnaire

4. Determine total cost of ownership

5. Prepare the matrix

The end result of Application Rationalization process can be a matrix as follows:

figure 1: matrix showing business value and technical fitness scores

Sample table showing Business Value and Technical Fitness Score:

figure 2: sample business and stack fitness scores

How Business Value and Technical Fitness scores are calculated?