quadrantChart title Application portfolio — value against technical health x-axis "Poor technical health" --> "Good technical health" y-axis "Low business value" --> "High business value" quadrant-1 Invest quadrant-2 Migrate or re-engineer quadrant-3 Eliminate quadrant-4 Tolerate "Order management": [0.28, 0.92] "Payment gateway": [0.81, 0.95] "Customer portal": [0.74, 0.78] "Pricing engine": [0.22, 0.84] "Mainframe billing": [0.14, 0.88] "Legacy CRM": [0.19, 0.34] "Reporting portal": [0.31, 0.26] "Expenses tool": [0.68, 0.22] "Intranet wiki": [0.72, 0.18] "Partner gateway": [0.44, 0.66]
What it is
Two axes — business value and technical health — with every application in the estate placed on them. The four quadrants give a default disposition: invest in the top right, re-engineer or migrate the top left, tolerate the bottom right, eliminate the bottom left.
It is a conversation device, not an algorithm. Its value is that it forces the business to place its own applications, and the placement of the top-left quadrant is always the argument worth having.
When you produce it
At the start of a rationalisation, a modernisation programme or a post-merger integration, once you have an inventory worth trusting. Refresh annually; the technical health axis moves faster than people expect and always downwards.
Who reads it
Executives, who use it to allocate budget. Enterprise architects, who use it to sequence work. Finance, once spend is overlaid as bubble size — which is when it usually stops being comfortable.
What good looks like
- Both axes have a stated rubric. "Technical health" should decompose into supportability, defect rate, dependency currency and skills availability, with a score anyone can reproduce.
- Business value is scored by the business, not by IT.
- Bubble size carries a third dimension — annual run cost, or user count.
- The high-value, low-health quadrant is small and named, because that is the risk register.
- Anything in the eliminate quadrant has a named owner and a date, or the map has changed nothing.
Common mistakes
- IT scoring business value. The map is then a picture of IT's preferences and the business will reject it.
- Everything in the top right. No owner rates their own system as low value or poor health; the rubric has to be applied by someone independent.
- Producing it once. An annual refresh is what turns it from a slide into a management instrument.
- No cost dimension, which is what makes the eliminate quadrant actionable.