“The price of doing the same old thing is far higher than the price of change” -BILL CLINTON
Your company has grown substantially over the last decades. Due to several mergers and acquisitions, the application portfolio of your enterprise has grown significantly. In the last years, the competition in the industry has increased, leading to increased pressure to reduce the operational expenses including IT. The Corporate Board has given a strategic direction to rationalize and consolidate the applications for commodity business services.
In this context, one of the business units of your company is planning application consolidation program and considering a Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) solution in order to respond to high IT operating costs and stability issues of current system portfolio. The current systems built in the early days are approaching the end of technology lifecycle and have performance limitations. It is not expected that any existing systems will be able to scale to support the consolidated business operations.

How does enterprise architecture help to solve my problem?
Several enterprise architecture tools and techniques can be utilized to start this journey in more systematic and structured way.
Diagnose sensitive capabilities
A business capability, or simply a “capability,” defines what a business does. Describing capabilities help the organization understand the autonomous, not redundant functions organization performs. Executives can use capability maps as input to strategic business analysis and planning, particularly when visualized as a color-coded “heat map.” In our scenario, capabilities having multiple implementations in terms of business units, business processes, and IT systems would appear in “yellow” or “red” and would be further analyzed as candidates for consolidation.
Analyze potential of process merging
Typical stakeholder concern in application consolidation projects is what changes to existing business processes are needed. Business process analysis can benefit a lot from process/organization, process/system relationship matrices. Having these artifacts produced, we should get the answer which business processes are redundant within an enterprise, and which steps within business processes have the most difficult implementation. This gives the basis for transformation activities and helps to structure the program.
Rationalize application portfolio
At this moment, we can research the industry for efficient COTS or outsourced solutions, which allows fix the gaps in most sensitive business areas. The analysis provides preliminary expected value and helps to reconsider priorities before implementation program starts.
Define integration need
The application interface catalog is important architecture delivery to understand the magnitude of integration needed, data sharing needs.
Roadmap for consolidation
A business/IT transformation roadmap is a high-level vision of the major phases, steps, and related dependencies to be considered as a strategy evolves.
Maximized return on investment
Enterprise architecture helps to understand how business processes and IT systems of different parts of organization complement each other and how they can be merged.
It helps to structure the program, to calculate business case, to run simpler and cheaper procurement and to govern the solutions being delivered and, as a result, it helps to simplify business processes and IT systems.
As an ultimate goal, it helps to achieve more efficient business and IT operation as it was expected in corporate strategy.