Capability area A4 · Activity 62020

TechnologyOperations& Resilience

Two uncomfortable questions about the estate you are already running: how much of it is waste, and how much of it would stop the business if it failed on a Monday morning?

Application inventory Licence duplication Cost review Dependencies Recovery planning
What this capability covers

Estates grow by accident. They rarely shrink by accident.

Nobody decides to run four tools that do the same job. It happens one reasonable decision at a time: a department buys something to solve an urgent problem, a trial subscription is never cancelled, an acquisition arrives with its own stack, a departing manager leaves a licence nobody can account for.

The same accretion produces fragility. Systems acquire dependencies on each other, on one supplier, on one server, or on one person — and the organisation only discovers which ones matter at the moment they fail.

This capability area addresses both: what the estate costs, and what it would cost you if part of it stopped.

Typical trigger: a finance review flags rising software subscriptions with no clear owner, or an outage — yours or a supplier's — makes it obvious that nobody has written down what depends on what.

  • Every application, licence and subscription in one inventory
  • Actual usage rather than assumed usage
  • Overlap identified between tools that do the same job
  • Critical business services mapped to their dependencies
  • Recovery priorities agreed before they are needed
Capability diagram

Every system has a cost and a criticality. Very few have been plotted against both.

Plotting the estate this way makes the decisions obvious. Expensive and uncritical is waste. Cheap and critical is exposure. The two quadrants demand opposite responses.

Estate cost against business criticality A four-quadrant plot of applications by annual cost and business criticality, showing waste candidates, protected core systems, low-priority tools and under-protected critical systems. Low business criticality Business cannot trade without it Low cost High cost Quadrant 01 — rationalise Quadrant 02 — protect & negotiate Quadrant 03 — leave alone Quadrant 04 — under-protected Legacy reporting tool — 6 users Duplicate file sharing Unused design licences Finance system Operations platform Team utilities Occasional tools Booking system on one old server Spreadsheet only one person maintains Q1 response Consolidate, cancel, renegotiate Q2 response Formal support, tested recovery Q3 response No action — the review says so explicitly Q4 response Usually the highest priority in the report
Cost concentration Protected core Exposure — critical but unsupported
Services in this area

Two services.

One reduces what the estate costs. One reduces what it could cost you. They share the same inventory work, so taking both together is usually cheaper.

07 Reviewing application inventory and technology costs Technology Operations & Resilience

IT Estate Rationalisation & Cost Review

A complete inventory with usage, cost, ownership and overlap — and a realistic consolidation plan with the savings quantified.

From£1,800 View service
IT Estate Rationalisation & Cost Review
08 Team planning technology resilience and recovery priorities Technology Operations & Resilience

Business Continuity & Technology Resilience Planning

Critical services mapped to dependencies, recovery priorities agreed, fallback options identified and procedures written down.

From£1,900 View service
Business Continuity & Technology Resilience Planning
Practical examples

What we find, and what we do about it.

SubscriptionsLicences without usersSeats still billed for people who left, or bought for a project that finished. Usually the fastest saving available and the easiest to verify.
OverlapThree tools, one jobSeparate departments each paying for file sharing, or project tracking, or e-signature. Consolidation needs a decision, not a discovery.
ContractsAuto-renewal without reviewRenewals that pass unexamined year after year. A review before the notice period is the cheapest negotiation you will ever run.
Single points of failureThe machine under the deskA critical process running on unsupported hardware or an old operating system that nobody wants to touch.
Key-person riskOne person holds it togetherA system only one colleague can administer, or a spreadsheet only they understand. Documented handover is the mitigation.
Supplier dependencyNo exit routeCritical data in a product with no practical export. Establishing the exit route matters even if you never intend to use it.
Common problems

Statements we hear at the first meeting.

  • 01“We do not have a full list of what we pay for”Software spend is frequently spread across departmental cards and expense claims. Assembling the list is often the single most valuable output.
  • 02“Nobody owns that system any more”Orphaned systems accumulate risk quietly. Assigning an owner is free, and it is usually the first recommendation.
  • 03“We assume it is backed up”Assumed backups and untested restores are different things. A restore test frequently changes the conversation entirely.
  • 04“We would just work on paper for a day”A reasonable plan that has never been checked against reality. Continuity planning tests whether the fallback is genuinely workable.
  • 05“Our supplier handles that”Sometimes accurate, often partial. The contract usually specifies less protection than people believe, and that gap should be known.
  • 06“It has never gone down”A statement about the past, not the future. Resilience planning is about the cost of the first occasion, not the frequency.
Start a conversation

Start with the question nobody has been asked to answer.

What do we pay for software each year, and which three systems would hurt most if they stopped? If those answers are not readily available, this is the right capability area.