What Comes Next After Application Assessment?

Application rationalization is a hot topic for many applications professionals and also draws the attention of enterprise architects and CIOs. Most organizations begin by compiling an inventory of the applications in a portfolio and assessing their applications via metrics collection and stakeholder surveys. Once they have compiled the information, the data often highlights egregious cases of redundant applications and other waste. But what are the next steps? In a world that brings new business challenges every day, how can you focus business leaders on the case to spend resources to shed duplicate applications when what they really want is more new applications? How can you turn your information-gathering exercise into a sustained effort to rationalize and optimize your organization's application portfolio?