Enterprise Software: Does Your Organization Run too Many Apps?

It’s not at all unheard of to walk into a very large organization and to find that installed within the organization is a complete range of similar applications all running within different departments or divisions, all handling roughly the same type of tasks, but each implemented to target just a subset of the organization’s processes and data.  As cloud-based applications grow in popularity, and as it becomes ever easier for groups within a company to sign-up for cloud services, it will become ever more difficult for organizations to centrally get control over all applications and data in their organization.

A report by Hewlett-Packard and Capgemini confirms the suspicion that many large organizations are unfocused in their attempts to manage the many applications that they run.  One problem that companies have is that the task of retiring applications is a difficult one.  Organizations find it cheaper to keep legacy applications around for a long time simply because it is too expensive to move onto something newer, but they also note that long term the costs of postponing app retirement add up.  In a somewhat mind-boggling number, large enterprises report that many  support up to 10,000 different applications.   And only four percent of all organizations say that all of the applications they are running are business critical.

Smaller businesses, with more focus in their tasks, tended to be more right-sized in the deployment of applications.  84 percent of small businesses report using less than 50 applications organization wide.  75 percent of small and medium business reported that they have just the right number of applications to support their operations, while just 23 percent thought that the balance of their applications relative to processes and data was out of whack.

The report finds that IT is caught in the middle of a crusade to bring down the cost of IT with demands to roll out ever more applications across all areas of the business and the need for IT to continually maintain and support a large base of existing applications.

When asked how long organizations retain data, the results were interesting:

• More than 60 percent say that they retain data past the point where they believe that they will ever need or use it again, just to be safe
• Only 33 percent say that they are able to meet a satisfactory balance of data destruction with a plan to maintain data long enough to meet regulatory compliance and business needs
• The remainder say that data management is a sever problem with important data frequently being lost

The report also captures the top three goals for CIOs today:

1. add value to their organizations
2. improve efficiency of IT
3. cut the costs of IT