I read a Gartner article that said that most organizations could save a substantial amount of money by implementing an effective application retirement plan. They also said that, on average, organizations could sunset 10% of their current application inventory without affecting the business at all.
Most organizations do a pretty good job of bringing in new technology but do a very bad job of retiring the old applications. This introduces more complexity into the environment and increases the costs of IT. Supporting
applications requires technical expertise, licensing costs and infrastructure. The cost of retaining knowledgeable people to run and maintain outdated systems should not be underestimated -- but it usually is. Just like pruning a tree to help it stay healthy, this is a big part of keeping the IT environment clean.
One key to retiring legacy systems is a good data retention standard. This should be created with the legal department as well as IT. Data retention categories should be created that clearly outline how long data should be kept for each key type of data (financial, HR, sales, etc.). These categories should then be applied to each application. This should be a field in your application inventory so it can be easily tracked and seen by everyone in IT.
The EA team should periodically identify retirement candidates, work with the rest of IT to flush out their costs (hidden and visible) and work within the project prioritization process to get a sunset project created to retire them. These are pure cost-savings efforts so they should be relatively easy to justify. Who runs these projects is dependent on the organization. Most EA groups won't have the bandwidth to actually run them but some organizations will have the manpower to pull it off.
Leveraging EA to identify these applications is a good practice to jump-start the process. For long-term sustainability, the project management process should incorporate this into the fully-baked costs for each project that brings in new technology. The burden for actually retiring systems that are being replaced should be on the project. This can be enforced from the PMO or ARB - whichever makes more sense for the organization. Either way, the EA team should be the driving force behind keeping the IT landscape clean through Application Sunset Planning.
If this is done well, the EA team can incubate Application Sunset Planning and eventually make it part of the DNA of IT projects. Periodically reviewing the Application Inventory for new targets should be part of the EA function but you should work to get the rest of IT excited about shutting down systems so you can all come up with creative ways of reducing your IT complexity.
