Business Options
Establish the business options
When deciding the future of an application, we must start with the future business needs to set the overall business investment policy for an application. Although there are a variety of approaches and options, from a pure investment perspective, there are just three basic categories, invest, manage or retire.
- Invest in applications that serve a key and strategic business capability that is likely to need to scale or to expand its scope
- Manage applications that serve the current and future business, but where steady-state is sufficient
- Divest applications that no longer fill a business need and where there are plans fr the application to be superseded by other applications or systems in the near future
Mapping Business Investment to Technical Options
Within these investments categories, we can now map these to the technical options. We describe these in detail the modernization Patterns section.
Note that here, we have not limited ourselves to cloud migration, but these categories are the same regardless of the target environment.
- Divest
- Retire (decommission)
- Manage
- Retain (do nothing)
- Rehost (Lift & shift)
- Replatform (Lift & shift)
- Invest