infoTECH Feature

May 17, 2011

Most IT Execs Say They Support Too Many Applications

A majority of IT professionals surveyed by outsourcing company Capgemini say they have more applications than necessary to run the business.

Published in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard (News - Alert), Capgemini’s “Application Landscape” report found that a wide variety of applications used in the enterprise are redundant or obsolete and no longer deliver value to the business.

Among the global CIOs and IT leaders surveyed, 60 percent of them said they currently support “more” or “far more” applications than necessary to run the business. As a result, a full 85 percent reported that their application portfolios are in need of rationalization, a method that analyzes applications to weed out the ones that are no longer pulling their weight. In fact, half of the IT executives interviewed said that up to 50 percent of the applications in use need to be retired.

To make matters more difficult, 56 percent of the larger enterprises said that at least half of their applications are custom-built rather than off the shelf, increasing their technical complexity.

Drilling down further, only 4 percent of those surveyed admitted that every IT system in use is deemed business-critical. A full 61 percent said they keep data beyond its expiration date just in case it’s needed.

Finally, only 13 percent of those interviewed acknowledged that their application developers and application support teams are in sync with each other, while 48 percent said that such teams are on the same page only half of the time or even less.

Supporting more applications and data than is necessary for the business taxes IT’s resources and ends up costing the business more money. But as Capgemini (News - Alert) points out, retiring redundant or obsolete applications and data isn’t an easy task as it poses several challenges, including the cost of retirement projects, the lack of quick return on investment, cultural resistance to change, regional differences, and the lack of qualified developers to migrate applications and data.

Application overload is certainly not a new problem for IT or the business community. We faced this very issue in IT at my former employer. As our company grew and integrated globally, we discovered more and more redundant and obsolete software across various regions and various departments. Rather than standardizing on key applications, the company over time has picked up a variety of different graphics programs, scanning software, PDF software, utilities, and much more.

The overwhelming number and variety of applications that IT had to support definitely taxed our resources and cost the company money that could have been spent otherwise. At that point, the powers that be decided to embark on a long and sometimes painful process to cut down on the number of supported applications and standardize on specific ones. The project often put IT at odds with end-users, who often complained that we were taking away their favorite software. But despite some resistance, overtime the project began to show real results as we trimmed away the number of unnecessary and obsolete applications, ultimately saving time for IT and cutting costs for the company.

Capgemini based its Application Landscape Report on its own analysts, surveys, and interviews with almost 100 IT leaders at companies of various sizes across both Europe and the United States.

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Lance Whitney is a journalist, IT consultant, and Web Developer with almost 20 years of experience in the IT world. To read more of Lance's articles, please visit his columnist page

Edited by Jennifer Russell
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