Managing Applications

Remember the days when I was new to an organization. My manager introduced me a good number of application leads and the applications used within the organization. I was overloaded with the names and the functionalities of each application. That was not easy to digest. For large organization, the number of applications could go to a few hundreds or even thousand. There could be applications that are not touched for decades, but being used and working properly (at least from business points of view).

There are a few questions we wish to answer in order to put these applications in a more manageable way:

1. What are these applications doing?
2. Are the applications with overlapping functionalities?
3. Are the applications still running on supported platforms?

For cusomer products, we may wish to package the same product with different brand names. Such that we could give a false perception to customers that they got a few more choices, and to increase the overall market share. We don't want to do the same for business supporting applications. We wish to minimize the cost to support the applications, and the complexity on integrations.

Before we consolidate, we need to identify the duplications. There could be a sage in your organization who has been living there for decades and knows everything under his fingertips. But the reality is less fortunate, new architects need to explore by themselves.

Instead of having a single person to visit every single application, we may wish to create categories and have multiple architects working in parallel to categorize the applications. If you have a very strong business knowledge for the organization, you could make up the categories by yourself. However, that is something unlikely a sage would do. Even if you have the business knowedge from another organization, the knowledge may not be fully applicable. Another way is honoring the existing organzation structure, and define the categories accordindly. The strategy is commonly known as Conway's Law.

With categories, each architect could focus on the fewer applications in each category. In addition to identify duplicating applications, architects would also wish to understand the missing functionality, and define the strategy with business owners to fulfil business objectives.

To make it more sexy, we use the term "Capability" for the functionalities, and "Capability Domains" for the categories or grouping.