Modernization Implies Simplification

MKSmith101| February 28, 2010

Simplification is a recurring theme in this blog. It is a
major goal of modernization. Simpler has many facets. I am going to consider
three today.

Unique mapping of business processes to
systems

Elimination of redundancy

Retirement of unused applications

How do we know we have unique realizations for those of our
business processes supported by automation? This question is filled with
implications - we can't know the answer without having categorized our business
processes and business objects and mapped these elements to our IT
systems.

This mapping enables two things - we can detect duplicates as
well as identify systems that no longer support our current business model. In either
case these become candidates for retirement. Retiring systems can be
expensive. Consider a case where we use three CRM systems (say as a result of
multiple acquisitions). Turning off two of these will not be a painless flip of a switch. It will require data migration, process changes to match the retained system and retraining .

Any time we are retiring a system, a critical consideration
are its archival requirements. Are we required legally to keep the data? Is
this data that we should be mining for historical trends that could be of value
to the business? If we are intending to retain data from retiring systems, do
we need it everything we have in existing archives or is there an opportunity to significantly reduce the volume of data to reflect our needs?

Retirement is both a huge opportunity and surprisingly
difficult. Nothing saves money like eliminating redundant systems, but it
requires confidence to stand up and say it is okay to turn a system off. This
confidence only comes by virtue of applying rigor to an analysis of your
portfolio. Something provided to you by an HP Application Porfolio
Rationalization.

In the future we will look as some of the other implications
arising from simplification.