Application Rationalization In 2005

IT organizations that fail to rationalize their application portfolios in 2005 are missing an opportunity to trim substantial costs from the maintenance budget, simplify their technology base and application portfolio, and lay the ground work for deciding the fate of existing applications; whether to leave as is, modernize, retire, or replace. The good news is that 2005 brings a bevy of tools and techniques to aid organizations in measuring, monitoring, deciding, and modernizing applications. With the number of choices comes a struggle for balance; over-reliance on one tool or technique may result in a less than optimum result.

[Via Recent Research from Forrester]

This will be some good holiday reading. The majority of organisation running Lotus Notes have got a substantial number of Domino applications. These applications are often a legacy they are dragging along eversince LN 4.x.
Because Notes applications are easy to develop, at a certain point also people with little development skills were creating them. The result hundreds or in some cases even thousands of applications. I know of organsiations who have recently migrated to LN 6.5.x and have in conjunction centralised their serverbase. On reviewing / rewriting their applications alone they’ve spent millions of Euro’s in manhours because of hardcoded server names and ‘web-enabling applications to mention a few.
Also there are dozens of applications addressing the same business issues such as CRM like functionality. So on the one hand companies are investing heavily in a CRM solution and on the other hand they are maintaining a lot of applications pretending to be CRM solutions.

The Notes community often uses this application lockin as a (or the prime) reason not to consider migration or replatforming. I agree that migrating all of the Notes applications is not an option to consider. Rationalisation on the other hand makes a lot of sence. How many application do you need to solve the same / similar issues in your organisation ? How else can you get rid of you Notes legacy and start innovating again ?
Yes 2005 is going to be a good year !