Technology Retirement

Obstacles

Most organizations do not have a clear strategy for retiring legacy systems and applications. Garnering support for technology sunsetting is difficult because:

  • Employees and business leaders tend to attach to the technologies they know.
  • It’s challenging to convey the escalating business risk and maintenance costs of older technologies before a high-profile system failure.
  • Interdependencies in the technology portfolio make prioritizing and sequencing retirement decisions a complex task.

As a result, sunsetting decisions are more of a fire drill than a planned event, and up to three-quarters of IT budgets are spent just “keeping the lights on.”

Solution

Step 1: Create a Proactive Technology Retirement Plan

  • Develop a consistent framework for making retirement decisions across the entire portfolio.
  • Gather all necessary information required for retirement planning (such as vendor support expiry dates) in one repository.
  • Map dependencies that would result in a “domino effect” if a given system is retired.

 

How CEB IT Roadmap Builder Can Help

  • Use our built-in Risk-Value Framework as a standard way to assess suitability for retirement of your entire portfolio.
  • Monitor vendor support deadline information at the click of a button with the Software Lifecycle Report.
  • Using Dependency Reports, identify the downstream and upstream impacts of retiring a particular system.

Step 2: Get Buy-In from the Business

  • Communicate to business executives in terms of business risk, not technical details.
  • Show how keeping legacy systems alive increases portfolio complexity and IT costs.
  • Start discussions ahead of time.

 

How CEB IT Roadmap Builder Can Help

  • Use our Complexity View to show the number of technologies entering and leaving the system in a given time period.
  • Plot technologies against “business impact of technology failure” and “likelihood of failure” to jump-start sunsetting discussions.
  • Spotlight systems with high maintenance costs or non-ideal retirement timelines.