Gartner said on their annual conference for CIOs in Barcelona that top priority (among many other things) for an CIO is to reduce the number of applications.
I fully agree!
Reducing the number of applications is a great way to save money and per definition everything left will be better integrated.
The cost for applications involves several components such as; infrastructure, licenses, maintenance, often consultants and internal costs for applications owners.
Sometimes companies forget to assign application ownership in a formal way but you can be pretty sure that the cost is there still (and probably higher) even if you do not have formal application owners.
I often find that clients that have acquired companies sit with applications that are duplicates more or less and I believe that focus should be to quickly get rid of these duplicats!
Step one for a CIO is too create a true list of all applications, where they are used and who is the application owner. It is surprising how hard that can be but it is a task that needs to be done.
I also believe that most LOB applications can be delivered from a central datacenter and while doing this a healthy bit of consolidation should happen.
Regards, Per
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