Application Rationalisation
Retire, consolidate, replatform — and why retirement is under-applied.
6 to work through
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advanced
A multi-product SaaS company has accumulated overlapping internal systems - three notification services, four job schedulers, two feature-flag systems. How should rationalisation be approached?
2 min answer -
advanced
A rationalisation programme assessed 400 applications and identified £8m of savings. Two years later nothing has been saved. Why?
2 min answer -
advanced
An application marked for retirement is switched off after its users are migrated. Nobody cuts the 14 interfaces that fed it or read from it. What happens over the following year?
3 min answer -
advanced Multiple choice
An enterprise consolidates nine departmental systems that all implement the same capability into one platform. Which risk materialises first and does most damage to the programme?
2 min answer -
advanced
An enterprise consolidates nine systems implementing the same capability into one. What are the risks, and what makes such programmes fail?
2 min answer -
advanced
An enterprise has 900 applications, many overlapping. How do you decide what to keep, consolidate, replace or decommission — and why do rationalisation programmes usually stall?
3 min answer
5 terms in this topic
Adoption Barrier Diagnosis
Treating duplicated internal systems as evidence that the shared option was harder to adopt than to rebuild - and fixing that before consolidating, o…
practiceApplication Portfolio Rationalisation
Systematically assessing every application in the estate to decide what to keep, invest in, consolidate or retire.
practiceApplication Rationalisation
Systematically reducing the number of applications in an estate by consolidating duplicates and retiring low-value systems.
conceptException Union
The failure mode of consolidation programmes in which the replacement system inherits the union of every source system's local exceptions, making it …
conceptZombie Integration
An interface left running after the system at one end is retired - it consumes credentials and produces stale or lost data, prevents the savings from…
Neighbouring topics
Enterprise Architecture
General material on architecture at portfolio and estate scale.
EA Domains
Business, application, data and technology architecture as viewpoints.
Application Architecture
The application estate as a designed portfolio rather than an accumulation.
Technology Architecture
Platforms, runtimes and infrastructure standards across the estate.
Capability Maps in EA
The stable frame for hanging investment, ownership and health off.
Application Portfolio Management
Inventory, ownership, cost and health for every application.
Technology Standards
Guidance that teams follow because it helps, not because it is mandated.
Technology Radar
Adopt, trial, assess and hold — with movement, dates and owners.
Reference Architectures
Pre-approved templates for recurring solution shapes.
Architecture Governance
Preventive, automated controls rather than review meetings.
Architecture Review Boards
Thresholds, early engagement and a real route to accept deviation.
Enterprise Integration
Estate-wide integration strategy, standards and shared infrastructure.
TOGAF
The ADM as a checklist, tailored rather than followed literally.
EA Frameworks
Zachman, FEAF and others — vocabulary rather than method.
Architecture Roadmaps
Sequencing change across an estate with dependencies and funding.
Paved Roads
Making the supported path the easiest path, with a way to leave it.
Platform Teams
Reducing other teams' cognitive load, measured by adoption.
InnerSource
Open-source collaboration practices applied inside an organisation.
EA Metrics
Measuring whether architecture work changed anything.