How to kill the orphans and move on: Gartner

Do you have a detailed inventory of your enterprise applications?

If you don't, you are likely running hundreds of "orphaned" applications, which are sucking your IT budget dry.

Andy Kyte, from Gartner's application strategy and governance team, last week warned organisations that their budgets were being drained by orphaned and unmanaged applications.

Kyte said enterprises need to do more than "simply stopping the bloated application portfolio getting bigger and bigger". Instead, he said the existing portfolio needs to be "rationalised and simplified", immediately.

Most large companies have an inventory of their applications but Kyte said these inventories rarely contained the correct type of data to be useful.

 "Many inventories support technical architecture, so they will tell you he version of the operating system or the version of the compiler. That data is necessary but it is not sufficient to manage the portfolio.

"You need three classes of data for each application. You need cost data, utilisation data and risk data," Kyte said.

He said inventories should state exactly how much an application costs to buy, how much it will cost to upgrade, how many people use the application, how much the hardware to run the application costs - and when that hardware will require an upgrade.

Kyte said once this process was carried out on the top 20 applications used in a company, it needs to then be carried out on the next 20 applications and then the next 50.

"You are leaders, you have to define reality in the application portfolio," he said. "Define reality even though it is not always pretty. Get control of your application portfolio - now."