Application Retirement — It's Time To Put The Elephant In The Room On A Diet

John Lennon's song "Beautiful Boy" contains a phrase apropos to the topic of applications retirement: "Life is just what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." In an applications context, bloat has been happening to our portfolios while we've been busy making other plans (i.e., new applications). We must satisfy business demand for new applications, but life has caught up to us, and it is anything but beautiful, boy. We've ignored the accumulation of bloat because with so much "real" work to do, spending precious resources to retire applications has simply not been a priority. However, business executives' rancor regarding the lack of innovation and excessive IT spending has reached a boiling point — it's time to put this elephant on a diet before it takes over the entire room.