Application Decommissioning 101: Getting Started

Accenture & Flatirons

Application Decommissioning 101: Getting Started

A legacy application is one that has been superseded by a more modern alternative and that is no longer in regular use by the original or any other business customer. It may still contain data that is valuable for historical reasons or that must be retained for legal, compliance, regulatory, and other reasons.

Application decommissioning is the process of identifying outdated, unsupported applications that contain data that must be retained but that can be “turned off” once their data is moved to a supported system. Application decommissioning enables organizations to systematically reduce the cost of maintaining legacy applications while providing ongoing access to data that can also be used for business analytics.

What is a legacy application?

What is application decommissioning?

What applications are good candidates for application decommissioning?

How Can Your Organization Get Started with Application Decommissioning

Application decommissioning starts with evaluating your existing application portfolio. The purpose of the assessment is to identify applications that are good candidates to be decommissioned based on the effort to retire them and the business value they provide.

Applications that are a good fit have one or more of the following traits:

• The application is no longer being used to create new data. Its primary function is to provide data for reporting, lookup, or reference.

• The application is being kept running to satisfy audit and regulatory requirements.

• The application may be storing data that is well past the “expiration date” for compliance purposes (although retention thresholds can vary widely by industry and statute) but the data can’t be expired due to limited or no retention and compliance functionality.

• The application was inherited/acquired through business events such as mergers or acquisitions that often result in overlapping, redundant, or obsolete applications.

• The application uses obsolete systems and technology but still holds content with some level of business value for the purposes of compliance, reporting, analytics, and financial operations.

Getting Started

A detailed analysis of an application portfolio considers three aspects of the application: the business impact, the data, and the technology platform.

Determine the business impact and value Plan for the managing the data

Consider the technology landscape

Questions to consider: Recommended artifacts to develop:

Recommended deliverables:

Identify and talk to business SMEs to understand business value and operational risks. Outline the dependencies and details for how the business relies on the application. The goal here is to determine if the data in the legacy application is still relevant to the business.

Figure out how to extract the data from the application. One of the steps of decommissioning an application is migrating data to a unified archive with a flexible data model that presents a single data store for searching across all legacy data, regardless of source or original format.

This is done by transforming and storing the data in XML, a vendor-neutral and self-describing format in which the data will always be accessible. Developing a set of specific artifacts will help determine the appropriateness and best way to extract, transform, and load the data.

As with any IT project, it is important to plan for the provisioning and deployment of the new environment that will support the information archive.

Creating these deliverables will help define the environmental requirements of the to-be vision.

• Does the data need to be accessed?

• Is the data redundant because of new applications?

• Has the data been migrated to a newer system? Can it be? Should it be?

• Is the data read-only?

• What is the type and nature of data updates if they occur?

• Are there any known or suspected governance impacts (e.g. HIPAA, CFR 21 Part 11, BASEL II, Dodd-Frank)?

• Create a high-level conceptual data model/ list of key managed information assets

• Determine volumes and complexities – table / file counts, record counts, raw data size, managed size, etc.

• Identify data retention policies / desires

• Define application requirements like search, detail views, and reporting

• Determine server / platform details – data, app, and web tiers (as appropriate)

• Create a simplified architecture diagram with clear application scope boundaries

• Document performance, availability, and other relevant non-functional requirements

It’s also beneficial to talk to IT administrators and architects to gain awareness of organizational initiatives (like virtualization, mainframe migration, cloud enablement, infrastructure refreshes) and what you can leverage, such as servers, hosting, and source code storage, etc.

The Big Question: Is the Cost to Decommission Worth it?

Calculating ROI

Information collected by the analysis will paint a picture of the challenges and effort required to decommission an application. The effort to replace the application can be estimated based on the complexity of the data migration and anticipated amount of configuration and customization required to achieve the desired functionality in the new application from the deliverables outlined above.

If the value of the application to the business is high, the next step is to determine the cost associated with the effort to setup the platform, migrate the data, and implement the solution.

Calculating the ROI can be done by comparing the cost to maintain the legacy application to the cost of the decommissioning effort. Optimal returns are realized by establishing a repeatable process for decommission legacy applications on an ongoing basis. Evaluating more than one application for decommissioning will illustrate the economies of scale and strategic value to your organization. OK, So Let’s Get Started

with a Risk-Free Assessment; schedule a meeting and address specific concerns with an email request to:

Andrew Bates Andrew.Bates@flatironssolutions.com

Thom Schiavone Thomas.Schiavone@accenture.com

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About Flatirons SolutionsFlatirons provides consulting, technology, and outsourcing for content lifecycle management (CLM). For more than 20 years, Flatirons has served global Fortune 1000 customers in aerospace, automotive, electronics, financial services, government, healthcare, and publishing. Flatirons’ customer engagements help organizations efficiently deliver the right information, at the right time, to the right people by leveraging structured content and digital media — Turning Content in to Knowledge®. See more at www.flatironssolutions.com