DECIDE WHAT TO KEEP, CONSOLIDATE, OR RETIRE
Somewhere in the portfolio is a system nobody remembers approving, and nobody willing to be the one who turns it off.
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Three teams are quietly running the same tool under three different names.
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The last app you flagged for retirement turned out to run month-end. That one’s still live.
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Finance, architecture, and the business unit each have a different list of what’s actually critical.
STALE BY THE TIME IT’S USED
Every rationalization effort starts with a list: every application, every platform, what it costs, who owns it. The list is usually right the day it's built and wrong within two quarters, because ownership turns over, a team quietly stands up a replacement, and nobody updates the record. By the time someone uses that list to decide what to retire, it's describing a portfolio that no longer exists.
The other failure shows up at the moment of the cut. An app gets flagged on cost alone, licensing looks expensive, usage looks low, and it turns out to be running something nobody mapped: the month-end job, the integration two other systems depend on. One bad retirement like that is enough to shelve the whole program, because the org remembers the outage, not the eleven apps that were retired safely before it.