Application sprawl is the reality of the modern software portfolio. Combatting this sprawl through software rationalization is an essential part of managing and modernizing these portfolios.
However, knowing you need to rationalize is the easy part. Executing it effectively requires a structured, methodical approach and the right set of tools to minimize risk and speed up timelines. EvolveWare’s Intellisys Platform is an example of such a tool. The Intellisys platform uses AI/ML technologies to automate core processes in documenting, analyzing, rationalizing and modernizing applications written in 20+ legacy and modern languages. Here is a five-step framework to guide your journey that also demonstrates where Intellisys fits in and the benefits the platform provides.
Step 1: Preparation, Scoping, and Assembling the Team
Before you even look at the extent of the application sprawl, you need to lay the groundwork for success.
- Secure Executive Sponsorship: A rationalization initiative will inevitably step on some toes. You will be challenging long-held assumptions and asking departments to give up their “pet” applications. Without strong, visible support from the C-suite (CIO, CFO, and even CEO), your efforts will stall at the first sign of resistance.
- Form a Cross-Functional Team: This is not just an IT project. Your core team should include representatives from:
- Enterprise Architecture: To lead the technical assessment and overall strategy.
- IT Finance: To track the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of applications.
- Business Unit Leaders: To provide critical context on how applications are used and the business value they provide.
- Application Owners/Managers: For deep-dive knowledge on specific systems.
- Security and Compliance: To assess the risk profile of each application.
- Define Scope and Goals: Are you going to rationalize the entire enterprise portfolio at once, or start with a single business unit? For a first attempt, starting smaller is often wiser. Set clear, measurable goals. Examples include:
- “Reduce our application count by 20% within 18 months.”
- “Lower our annual software licensing and maintenance costs by 15%.”
- “Eliminate all redundant CRM platforms within one year.”
Step 2: Discovery and Building the Inventory
This is often the most labor-intensive phase. You can’t rationalize what you don’t know you have. The goal is to create a comprehensive, single source of truth for your entire application portfolio.
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- Gather the Data: Use a combination of methods to find every application.
- Automated Discovery Tools: These tools can scan your network and servers to identify installed software.
- CMDBs (Configuration Management Databases): If you have one, it’s a great starting point, but be aware it’s likely incomplete.
- Financial Records: Scour purchasing and accounts payable records for software licenses and maintenance payments.
- Surveys and Interviews: Talk to business users. This is the best way to uncover “Shadow IT”—applications purchased and used by departments without official IT approval.
- Gather the Data: Use a combination of methods to find every application.
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- Create the Application Catalog: Once you’ve created a list of applications, you need to capture a consistent set of attributes that ideally is also easily updateable. Key data points to collect include:
- Basic Info: Application Name, Version, Vendor.
- Ownership: Business Owner, Technical Owner.
- Usage: Who uses it? Which departments? How many users? How frequently is it used?
- Business Context: What business capability does it support (e.g., “Lead Management,” “Payroll Processing”)? How critical is this capability
- Business Functionality: To identify overlapping applications it may be necessary to do a “deep-dive” into the business functionality embedded in the application.
- Financials: License costs, annual maintenance, support costs, estimated infrastructure costs (TCO).
- Technical Info: Underlying technology (Java, .NET, etc.), database, servers it runs on, integrations with other systems.
- Risk & Compliance: Does it store sensitive data (PII, PCI)? Is it compliant with regulations like GDPR or HIPAA?
- Create the Application Catalog: Once you’ve created a list of applications, you need to capture a consistent set of attributes that ideally is also easily updateable. Key data points to collect include:
While some of this information will require stakeholder input, using traditional, manual methods for items such as business functionality and technical info is ineffective and prone to errors. With the Intellisys platform:
- You can automate the discovery and understanding processes needed to obtain a comprehensive view of this information. Intellisys uses machine learning technologies to extract metadata from your source application code and provide information such as program flow and dependencies, data flow diagrams, business logic in multiple formats and more.
- Information can automatically be updated as changes are made to the source code file to ensure that no updates are lost during the rationalization process. You get an evolving, up-to-date map of the application and data landscape, allowing you to navigate next steps with confidence.
- Modern AI technologies provide a comprehensive understanding of the code and reliable consolidation of the raw business logic into higher level policies or “rules”.
- Rules can be exported in a variety of formats, allowing you to perform subsequent analysis in the manner that is most convenient for your project.
- Built-in traceability features give you the peace of mind of knowing that you have all the information you need from the source application and won’t miss out on critical policies.
Step 3: Analysis and Assessment (Applying the TIME Model)
With your inventory complete, the analysis can begin. This is where you evaluate each application against standard criteria to determine its fate. The most effective way to visualize this is by plotting each application on a 2×2 matrix.
- The Y-Axis: Business Value: How important is the application to the business? This is determined through interviews with business leaders. Is it mission-critical? Does it provide a competitive advantage? Or is it of low/niche importance?
- The X-Axis: Technical Fitness: How healthy is the application from a technical standpoint? Is it stable, secure, scalable, and built on a modern platform? Or is it a buggy, high-risk legacy system?
Plotting your applications on this matrix will naturally group them into four quadrants, which align perfectly with the TIME (Tolerate, Invest, Migrate, Eliminate) model.
- Invest (High Business Value, High Technical Fitness): These are your star players. They are technically sound and strategically important. The decision here is to invest in them. This could mean adding new features, expanding their use across the organization, or ensuring they are on the latest version.
- Tolerate (High Business Value, Low Technical Fitness): These applications are critical, but they are a technical mess. They are often legacy “crown jewels.” You can’t just turn them off, but pouring money into their old technology is a bad long-term strategy. The decision is to “Tolerate” them for now—keep them running, fix critical bugs, but don’t add new functionality. The long-term plan is often to find a path to migrate them.
- Migrate (Low Business Value, High Technical Fitness): This quadrant is less common. It might be a technically excellent platform that simply doesn’t support a critical business function or has been superseded by a better enterprise standard. The goal is to migrate the few remaining users or useful functions to a preferred system and then eliminate this one. A more common scenario for “Migrate” is for applications in the “Tolerate” quadrant. The action plan for a high-value but low-tech-fitness application is to actively plan its migration to a modern replacement. For example, migrating from an on-premise legacy CRM to a cloud-based platform like Salesforce.
- Eliminate (Low Business Value, Low Technical Fitness): This is the low-hanging fruit. These applications are not important to the business and are technically poor. They are redundant, obsolete, or simply unused. The decision is clear: plan to decommission and eliminate them as quickly as possible.
Intellisys’ documentation & analysis and rules extraction features facilitate the analyses that must be performed through:
- Assessment reports that identify various areas of optimization including code that is complex, dead code, redundant code, and more.
- Analysis features that include finding identical code blocks to discover redundancies.
- Export of consolidated rules to in text formats or to a project management tool like JIRA, which can be shared with business stakeholders to determine which rules are critical to keep, update or retire.
- Identification of where multiple systems may be executing the same rules.
Step 4: Planning the Roadmap and Gaining Consensus
Your analysis has given you a disposition (Invest, Tolerate, Migrate, Eliminate) for every application. Now you need to turn this into an actionable plan.
- Prioritize: You can’t do everything at once. Prioritize based on a combination of factors:
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- Quick Wins: Target the “Eliminate” applications that are easy to retire and offer significant cost savings. This builds momentum and demonstrates value early on.
- High Impact: Focus on high-cost, high-risk applications in the “Tolerate” category that have a clear migration path.
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- Develop the Roadmap: Create a multi-year roadmap that visualizes the plan. It should show which applications will be decommissioned, which will be migrated, and the timelines for each.
- Create Detailed Plans: For each “Migrate” and “Eliminate” decision, you need a mini-project plan. This must include steps for data archiving or migration, managing user transition and training, communicating the change, and finally, the technical decommissioning of servers and cancellation of contracts.
- Communicate and Validate: Socialize your findings and the proposed roadmap with stakeholders. Explain the “why” behind each decision using the data you’ve gathered. Be prepared for pushback and be ready to defend your recommendations.
Step 5: Execution and Establishing Continuous Governance
This is where the plan becomes reality.
- Execute the Roadmap: Begin executing your prioritized projects. Decommission servers, cancel licenses, migrate users. Meticulously track your progress against the goals you set in Step 1. Report on savings and risk reduction to your executive sponsors.
- Establish Ongoing Governance: To prevent the application sprawl from coming back, you must change your processes.
- Create an Application Onboarding Process: Any request for a new application must go through a formal review. Does it meet a valid business need? Is it redundant with an existing “Invest” application? Does it meet security and architecture standards?
- Make Software Rationalization Cyclical: Schedule a formal portfolio review annually or semi-annually. The world changes, and an “Invest” application today might become a “Tolerate” candidate in two years. This continuous cycle ensures your portfolio remains optimized.
Overcoming the Inevitable Hurdles
The path to a rationalized portfolio is fraught with challenges. Being aware of them is the first step to overcoming them.
- Cultural Resistance: The most common hurdle is the emotional attachment people have to their tools. You will hear “But we’ve always done it this way!” or “That little app is critical for my team’s report!” The key is communication. Show them the data, explain the bigger picture, and provide a clear, well-supported migration path to a better, standard tool. Intellisys’ ability to present application data in multiple formats that speak to different stakeholders facilitate this communication.
- Inaccurate or Incomplete Data: The GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) principle applies here. If your initial inventory is poor, your decisions will be flawed. Invest the time and use Intellisys to make the discovery phase as thorough as possible.
- Hidden Dependencies: You decide to eliminate App A, only to discover it generates a data file that is essential for mission-critical App B to function. This is why using a tool like Intellisys that identifies missing files and dependencies is a non-negotiable part of the assessment phase.
- Shadow IT: Business departments that are used to buying their own SaaS solutions with a credit card may resist a central governance process. The solution is to make the official process easy and responsive. If IT is seen as an enabler rather than a blocker, departments will be more willing to collaborate.
Stop Guessing, Start Analyzing
Software rationalization is imperative in today’s competitive climate. Yet, for too long, organizations have been forced to tackle this critical task with inadequate processes and tools, relying on manual effort, incomplete data, and institutional memory. The results have been predictably disappointing.
Evolveware’s Intellisys Platform fundamentally changes the equation. It replaces manual toil with intelligent automation, guesswork with verifiable data, and fear with fact-based confidence. It illuminates the black boxes within your legacy portfolio, providing the clarity needed to see the redundancy, complexity, and dependencies that have held your business back.
By leveraging Intellisys and the 5 step method we introduced, you can transform software rationalization from a high-risk, resource-draining exercise into a repeatable, value-creating process.
