Today, many companies manage an inventory of several hundred applications that were developed in-house and evolved over time to include new functionality or were integrated into an existing application landscape with the acquisition of a new company. These applications are used in parallel, sometimes containing the same or similar functionality. In many cases, different applications with the same functionality are used in different regions and countries.
Identifying these areas of overlap is a starting point – and a challenge – for application optimization. Slicing applications into smaller building blocks and defining microservices would solve the problem, but this is already a major project on its own, and many enterprises don’t have the capacity and budget to transform applications in this way. As a prerequisite for the development of microservices, companies must define the business processes that are global. This requires the involvement of the entire organization and strong backing from management to get to the necessary results – especially in a siloed organization.
At the same time, cloud- and low- or no-code solutions are being purchased directly by business departments as SaaS or PaaS solutions, and transferring management of these applications to IT. These decentralized purchases may also lead to overlap or duplication in functionality and can cause considerable redundancy and cost. It becomes particularly challenging for a CIO when acquisitions of applications executed in the business create a shadow IT in the business units. This happens when solutions are purchased and not handed over to IT.
All these scenarios generate high costs in terms of maintenance, support and operation of the application landscape, as well as for the ongoing development. They also create a greater number of interfaces that must be maintained to ensure data integrity.
This ISG white paper Application Optimization: Begin with a Strategic Make-or-Buy Decision explores how enterprises can optimize their application portfolio to save costs, manage security and improve operations.
About the author
Tobias Link
Tobias has more than 20 years of experience in application management and sourcing. Before joining ISG more than six years ago, he worked for a Tier-1 provider, shaping large outsourcing contracts. He focuses on the interaction and orchestration of all involved parties during sourcing initiatives, striving for the best-fit outcome.
