Eleven policy systems, one inventory, four retirements
The assessment found eleven where the org chart said six.
The program
| Sector | Banking and insurance |
|---|---|
| Systems found | 11 |
| Systems on the org chart | 6 |
| Scope | Estate assessment, then four retirements |
| Duration | 6 weeks assessment, 11 months retirement |
| Status | Four retired, seven with named owners |
Five of the eleven were invisible to the organization that ran them. Not hidden — invisible, which is different. They had owners once, the owners moved on, the systems kept running, and because they kept running nobody had reason to notice the ownership had lapsed.
Four turned out to be retirable inside a year. Two were carrying a single report each, both of which could be produced from somewhere else in an afternoon. One had been superseded in 2021 by a system that was itself now scheduled for replacement. The fourth was a genuine surprise: a policy administration system for a product line the firm had exited, still running, still licensed, still patched.
The other seven were not retirable and are not going anywhere. What changed is that each of them now has a name against it — a person who agreed, in a meeting, that this was theirs. That took an afternoon and it is worth more than the four retirements, because the four were a one-off and the ownership is what stops the next five going quiet.
We did not do the ownership part. The client did, in one session, once the inventory made the gap impossible to look away from.
The seven we did not retire now have somebody’s name against them. That is worth more than the four, and it took an afternoon.
>
— Priya Vasterling, Principal, Estate Assessment
Four gaps in the run
Four gaps in the binder shelf, unevenly spaced, and nobody has pushed the rest together. The saving was checked against the invoice three months after cutoff.
