So 90 percent of economists said recently that they expect the Great Recession to end this year.  The bad news – any recovery will take months to ripple into IT spending. CIOs at mid-sized organizations can expect to be told to do more with less for the foreseeable. The trouble is, the Great Recession will end. And if you forestall certain projects, you’re sure to be way behind come the Great Recovery. Says Gartner, “future-thinking and cost-cutting often cancel each other out.”

One area that eats resources like a network engineer at a shrimp bowl is your application portfolio. Too often low performing applications just continue to under-perform, too important to retire, and too expensive to replace.

Now here comes the “lemonade from lemons” part. Writing at IT Jungle, Dan Burger gets this nugget from consultant Tom Pacileo: "We're witnessing the best opportunity since Y2K to address problems in how companies use business critical applications. Top performers are recognizing they can't run a 21st century business on 20th century technology."

As eWeek pointed out late last year in an extensive feature on application portfolio management: “A huge portion of IT resources is being wasted on the support and maintenance of outdated legacy applications.”
The remedy: There are a few names for it: Application Portfolio Optimization, Rationalization, Modernization; choose your word, but they boil down to the essentials:

• Know what you have; its business value and where it is in its lifecycle
• Define the stakes, communicate the strategic benefits, and think ahead
• Decide your plan of attack: retire, replace, remediate?

In this week’s Expert POV, Rob Dulacka recommends that you take a disciplined approach to managing application software investments through a formal assessment program. Gartner  has made a strong case for remediation, asserting that teams “don’t aim for perfection but at bringing under-performing applications back within accepted business, technical and operational standards.” Essentially a “good enough” goal.

But midsize companies have their own challenges that deter addressing this issue: smaller staff, frozen or declining IT budgets, shortsighted financial planners, and so forth.

So what can you do? Use the tools you have. Recent research by The Hackett Group shows that “few companies use tactics such as charge backs, service catalogs, or IT portfolio management to reduce costs, despite the fact that these techniques can drive real savings.”

Next, get going! Pick the framework that fits, whatever you need to call it  - optimization, rationalization, modernization – put your team together and get to it. As Gartner’s Kathy Harris says, “This is not the easy stuff – this is the hard stuff. And this is one of your best investments for the future – innovating how you spend to run the business.”