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Application Rationalization

Reducing a portfolio assembled independently over decades — platform consolidation, technology lifecycle planning and technical debt reduction.

Left to right is time. Each row is one of the 6 disciplines this one worked alongside, ordered so kindred disciplines sit next to each other rather than alphabetically — a landscape only means anything if neighboring rows belong together. Height is the work running in that domain in that year, weighted by what failure would have cost — life-safety ×3, a statutory obligation ×2.2, the estate itself ×1.5, an evaluation ×1. Every project declares which of those it was, so each ridge traces to an entry you can open and disagree with. Only the work that used this technology is counted, so what shows here is the company it kept rather than the record around it. Height and color are on the record-wide scale rather than this page’s own, so a modest estate draws a modest landscape and any two of these pages can be read against each other.

Driving application rationalization, platform consolidation and technology lifecycle planning across a portfolio of 300-plus applications assembled independently over decades by agencies that each bought for themselves.

Rationalization in a federated estate is not a de-duplication exercise. Two agencies running the same function on different platforms may both be right, because their obligations differ; the work is establishing which duplication is accidental and which is structural.

Applied in

  • Modernizing Legacy Industrial Systems with AI2026An unsupported industrial application whose analysis was still right and whose reference data was not — rebuilt from its inputs, without altering a line of its code.
  • Diversified Industrial Manufacturer2025–2026Business-unit and data center assessments, automated discovery and network assurance, an enterprise architecture review, and integration across two acquisitions.
  • Architecture Review BoardFrom November 2021The successor governance body, and the first with a budget attached — a five-to-ten year capital plan rather than a rolling list of purchases.
  • Enterprise Architecture Program2009–2024The EA practice itself — business, information, technical and solution viewpoints, with strategy, assessments and multi-year capability roadmaps for a platform shared by agencies that answered to different elected officers.

Career

See also

Also searched as

  • business architecture
  • business capability model
  • BIZBOK
  • capability-based planning
  • value stream