The most common 'quick win' in a digital transformation is the application kill list: retire 20% of the portfolio and bank the savings. Zafar Chaudry, former CDO and CAIO at Seattle Children's, put the real number on that pitch at a healthsystemCIO webinar this summer: the programs promise 20%, and by fiscal year-end they realize 'more like 5 or 6 percent.'
Why the 20% never lands
The gap isn't laziness. It's arithmetic nobody priced at approval time. Turning an app off costs money before it saves any: governance, approvals, state data-retention rules, and an archive that carries its own bill. As Chaudry put it, 'it also would probably cost money before you can save money.' Then comes the math he wants the industry to publish — a million dollars in committee labor to save $200K in licensing.
A kill-list framework you can run this quarter
- Score on value, not logins. Providence's Adar Palis warns login counts are where you start, not where you stop. Rank every application on value delivered, workarounds, in-suite overlap, and security exposure.
- Treat sprawl as attack surface. Ransomware keeps entering through little-known, unpatched apps nobody remembered owning.
- Sponsor it from the COO's office. 'This is not an IT decision,' Palis says. IT supplies the inventory and comparisons; the business owns the off switch.
- Publish the showback. If the kill costs more than the keep, keeping it is a valid outcome — not a failed program.
Stop judging an application by how exciting it was when you bought it. Judge it by the value it delivers today — and by the fully-loaded cost of turning it off.