Kathryn Palmer

Kathryn Palmer leads the General Services Administration’s application rationalization project, which is a fancy way of saying she hunts down apps that aren’t pulling their weight. It is a structured methodology for analyzing a portfolio of applications. But when she started with the acquisition portfolio, there were three lists of applications, none of which were authoritative.

Palmer began by surveying users and systems administrators for their business and technical input, then she graphed the different phases of each application’s life cycle according to whether to tolerate, invest, migrate or eliminate an app.

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Then she led deep dives into each app with the business and technical owners to determine the capabilities the application supports, how widely it is used, associated costs and other details. Based on that information, she and her team developed recommendations for senior agency leaders.

Her efforts resulted in 33 applications being tagged for elimination and an estimated $9 million in cost avoidance from fiscal 2015 to 2017. The estimated return on investment was a whopping 1,320 percent.

In addition, Palmer identified four-year strategic roadmaps to indicate whether each application would be tolerated, invested in, migrated or eliminated over that period. The roadmaps help agency executives make data-driven investment decisions.

Her managers say she maintained a positive attitude even when political, technical or business challenges arose. The project never fell behind schedule and was successful throughout the two years. Beyond the cost savings, they say her work has resulted in centralized data, better resource utilization, increased security and improved communication between apps’ business and technical owners.