Question

What are some common challenges in decommissioning applications?

Answer
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The decommissioning of applications can be a significant burden for an enterprise, especially one that has tended to update and upgrade or replace existing applications without properly retiring older ones.

Companies face many different challenges in decommissioning large numbers of applications. Many of them are related to giving the new applications the functionality that they need, and making sure that older applications are actually “dead” or ready for retirement.

Gartner estimates that from 2016 to 2020, stakeholders will decommission three times more than the total number of applications decommissioned in the last 16 years. There is a feeling that businesses have in general delayed or deferred decommissioning, often at their peril.

Often dealing with fairly complicated architectures, businesses must be sure, as mentioned above, that new applications are fully provisioned before retiring or decommissioning one that is considered obsolete. Otherwise, the company may have to go back and rely on the legacy application when the new one fails, or is not able to handle demands that are placed on it. At the same time, trying to decommission an old application without total cessation of use and data extraction can have its own problems. There is the issue of making sure that sensitive data is handled well, and in some cases, extracting all of the data from the old application can be difficult.

In other cases, companies retain data in the old system for archive use – for things like e-discovery or industry compliance. Then there’s the burden of maintaining access to the old application.

In order to plan the decommissioning of applications well, companies might use a decision matrix or other resource to look at various issues, from licensing to user experience to specific functionality in business processes. Gartner recommends appointing an “undertaker” or point person or team to decommission applications. The general sense is that companies should invest more time and effort into planning decommission, and understanding their architectures better, so that they can more efficiently add, subtract or change applications according to real operational requirements, and not blindly.

Justin Stoltzfus
Contributor
Justin Stoltzfus
Contributor

Justin Stoltzfus is an independent blogger and business consultant assisting a range of businesses in developing media solutions for new campaigns and ongoing operations. He is a graduate of James Madison University.Stoltzfus spent several years as a staffer at the Intelligencer Journal in Lancaster, Penn., before the merger of the city’s two daily newspapers in 2007. He also reported for the twin weekly newspapers in the area, the Ephrata Review and the Lititz Record.More recently, he has cultivated connections with various companies as an independent consultant, writer and trainer, collecting bylines in print and Web publications, and establishing a reputation…