Assessment & Disposition
A verdict on every application, what that verdict commits you to, and the order the moves have to happen in.
Part of the review. Not sold separately. It is the last part of the application estate review, and the review is bought as one piece.
A leadership team that has to decide what to keep, fix, replace and switch off, and make the decision stick.
The rationalization exercise from two years ago produced a spreadsheet, and nothing was ever switched off.
The classification is the easy part. Anyone can sort an estate four ways in an afternoon. What makes a rationalization hold is that each verdict is a commitment somebody has agreed to carry, and that the moves are ordered so the ones that depend on each other happen in the right sequence.
Scored against evidence, not advocacy
Business value is not what the owner says it is. It is what the business loses if the system stops: which capability it serves, how central that capability is to how you compete, how many people depend on it, what happens on the day it is gone.
Technical condition is not how old it is. It is supportability, the state of the integrations, whether anyone left can change it, what the vendor’s roadmap says, and how exposed it is.
Both scores get written down with the evidence. That is what stops the exercise becoming a negotiation six weeks later.
The verdict is a commitment
Tolerate means agreeing to spend nothing and to live with the known problems. Invest means enhancement money that will otherwise drift somewhere louder. Migrate means committing real money and disruption to something that currently works well enough to avoid, which is why the migrate list is where rationalizations quietly die. Eliminate means someone has to run the decommissioning, cancel the contract, and own the people who liked it.
Written down and owned, these are decisions. Left implicit, they are drift with a label on it. The longer argument is here.
Sequence is what makes it real
A disposition list is not a plan. Half the eliminations are blocked by something else: a report that has to be rebuilt first, an integration that has to be rerouted, a year-end that must not be disturbed, a contract that cannot be exited until its renewal window. And the capacity to do any of it is finite and already committed to other things.
The roadmap orders the moves against those constraints and stops at what is actually deliverable in the period. A shorter sequence that happens beats a complete one that does not.
What usually falls out
Three things, on most estates. A handful of eliminations that pay for the first year of the work. One migration everyone has been avoiding, now with a date against it. And a gap — a capability the business depends on with no system behind it — that was invisible until the estate was mapped, and that turns out to matter more than anything on the elimination list.
What this part produces
The work we do
- Score every application on business value and technical condition, against evidence rather than advocacy
- Assign a verdict — tolerate, invest, migrate or eliminate — and write down what that verdict commits you to
- Name an owner for each verdict, because an unowned decision is a label
- Sequence the moves against dependencies, contract dates and the capacity you actually have
- Cost the sequence, including the run cost that continues until something is genuinely off
- Identify the decisions that cannot wait, and the ones that are cheaper to defer deliberately
What you receive
- A scored assessment of every application with the evidence behind each score
- A verdict per application, with its commitment and its owner stated
- A sequenced roadmap that respects dependencies, renewal dates and delivery capacity
- A costed view of what the sequence saves and what it costs to get there
- A written record of the trade-offs, for when a displaced sponsor comes back
How we know it is finished
Every application has a verdict with an owner, the sequence is agreed by leadership, and the first moves have dates against them.
What we need from you
- A decision-maker who can say no to a system's advocate and make it hold
- An honest view of delivery capacity, not the optimistic one
- Agreement that a verdict is a commitment, not a rating
What you keep
The code and the data·Your existing relationships·Approval and control·The ability to stop·The off switchWhat that means
Capability Modelling
What the business does, stated once and independently of the org chart — the frame everything else in the review hangs off.
Learn more ↗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.
Learn more ↗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.