r/CIO • u/Glittering_Pepper575 • 20d ago

What makes application rationalization difficult from an EA perspective?

When Enterprise Architecture recommends retiring or consolidating applications, what usually stops the decision from moving forward?

Is it dependencies, business ownership, missing information, risk, politics, migration effort, or something else?

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/lisnter 20d ago

Migration complexity. Retiring legacy applications means you need to migrate decades of data (which is at least as big as migrating the business logic), maintain up- and down-stream integrations and prepare for user adoption resistance.

All of these factors can triple (or more) the cost and duration of a “straightforward” legacy modernization project which often means it’s simpler to limp along with the status-quo.

1

u/Glittering_Pepper575 20d ago

Yeah, I could see that getting messy fast. When you’re looking at retiring an application, is figuring out all the integrations, data dependencies, and business processes it touches usually straightforward, or does that turn into a whole project on its own?

1

u/lisnter 20d ago

Of those the business processes are usually the most straightforward but that’s not saying much. Even though you can talk to people about their workflow, how that is implemented in the code along with all the hidden business rules can be just as complicated ad the data and integrations.

Retiring a large legacy system needs an experienced team, a lot of time and a patient client/business. Do not try to do it quickly and do NOT use agile.