Application Landscape Mapping
Every application you run, with its owner, cost and connections, mapped onto the capability model until the duplication and the gaps are visible.
Part of the review. Not sold separately. It is the second part of the application estate review, and the review is bought as one piece.
A technology leader who cannot produce one list of what the business runs, or can produce three lists that disagree.
A renewal lands for something nobody can name an owner for, or an acquisition has doubled an estate that was already unclear.
There are usually three lists. One in the finance system, one in the identity provider, and one a previous analyst built in a spreadsheet. They disagree, and the applications that matter most are often on none of them.
The inventory is a reconciliation, not a survey
Asking people what they use produces a list of what people remember. The estate is found by triangulating the places money and access leave a trace: the ledger and AP file, the single sign-on directory, expense claims, the contract folder, and what the network sees leaving the building.
What that turns up is the part nobody had counted. A department paying for its own tool monthly. A database that runs a business process and appears on no list because it never had an invoice. The reporting environment someone built that four people now depend on.
Record only what a decision needs
An inventory that tries to record everything never finishes. A decision needs: who owns it, what it costs to run for a year, how many people actually sign in, where it runs, who supports it, what it connects to, and when the contract renews. Seven fields, and the last one is the one that most often forces the decision.
Mapping is where it becomes useful
A list is administrative. The same list attached to the capability model is an argument. Coverage becomes visible: the capability served by four systems because three acquisitions each brought their own, the capability served by none because the work happens in a shared mailbox, the capability the business genuinely competes on that is running on the oldest thing you own.
Cost lands on the map too. Spend per capability is usually the slide that changes the conversation, because it shows money concentrated where the noise is rather than where the value is.
The connections matter as much as the applications
Nothing in an estate can be assessed alone. An application with almost no users can be impossible to remove because two others read from it nightly. A manual connection — someone exporting from one system and importing to another every Monday — is a real integration with a real cost and no documentation, and it will not appear in any technical scan.
These are what turn a disposition list into a sequence. The assessment is next, and the worked example shows both on one estate.
What this part produces
The work we do
- Assemble one inventory from the places the truth is scattered: the ledger, the identity provider, expense claims, contracts and the network
- Find the applications that are on none of those lists — the departmental subscriptions, the databases, the spreadsheets that became systems
- Record what matters for a decision: owner, annual cost, user count, hosting, support arrangement, contract and renewal date
- Map every application to the capabilities it serves, and mark where four serve one and none serve another
- Trace the integrations, including the ones that are a person re-keying between two screens
- Note the dependencies that constrain sequencing later: what cannot be switched off until something else moves
What you receive
- One application inventory, reconciled across sources, with an owner named against every line
- A capability map showing coverage, duplication and gaps at a glance
- Annual run cost per application, and per capability, including the costs that arrive on someone's credit card
- An integration and dependency picture, including the manual connections
- A contract and renewal calendar, so decisions get made before dates make them
How we know it is finished
One inventory exists that the business accepts as the list, every application has an owner and a capability, and nothing material is known to be missing.
What we need from you
- Read access to the ledger or AP data, the identity provider and the contract repository
- Someone who can authorize us to ask department heads what they are paying for
- Tolerance for the finding that the estate is larger than the official list
What you keep
The code and the data·Your existing relationships·Approval and control·The ability to stop·The off switchWhat that means
Start with a 45-minute briefing.
Bring the renewal you cannot answer, the list nobody trusts, or the two systems that do the same job. We will tell you honestly where to start.