Assessing an Enterprise Application Portfolio for a European Retailer

Project snapshot

The client brought Intellias in to assess the organization’s full application portfolio: 384 applications with no consistent record of who owned them or which business domain they belonged to. Intellias ran an AI-assisted application portfolio assessment that mapped 85% of those applications to product domains, surfaced the risk hiding in the remaining gaps, and delivered a prioritized set of recommendations along with a roadmap for what should happen next.

It was also a new ground for the relationship. This kind of organization-wide, consulting-style assessment wasn’t something the team had done for this client before — it meant technical specialists stepping into a strategic advisory role.

Business challenge

The client needed a full picture of the application landscape. Many applications had been built and evolved independently by local IT teams, with limited visibility or involvement from the domain architects meant to be accountable for them.

Product registration was open and loosely governed, so new applications entered the landscape without a clear assignment to a domain or an owner. The result was a governance gap that made it hard to say, with any confidence, what the organization actually ran and who was responsible for it.

That gap wasn’t just administrative. Once the enterprise application architecture assessment got underway, it surfaced real operational risk sitting inside the unmapped portion of the portfolio:

• compliance tools that had been quietly discontinued or retired without a documented replacement
• critical processes running on undocumented Excel macros and legacy scripts owned by individual employees
• five on-premises SAP systems set to lose mainstream vendor support at the same time in December 2027 — with migration timelines of 18 to 36 months, meaning the window to act was already closing.

Solution

Intellias combined a structured application assessment framework with AI-assisted analysis to map the portfolio at speed. Of the 384 applications assessed, 268 were assigned to a product domain, 53 stale or duplicate records were cleaned up and removed, and 63 were left in a pending list requiring further input from domain architects or infrastructure teams before they could be classified.

The team went further than simple mapping, sorting the portfolio by governance maturity — from applications with established ownership already visible in the client’s architecture tooling, through newly assigned products still needing enrichment, to the cross-domain cases still awaiting resolution. That breakdown gave the client’s Enterprise Architecture function a concrete, prioritized view of where to focus next rather than a flat list of applications.

The assessment also quantified technical debt that had been invisible without it: 66% of the portfolio turned out to be custom-built, well above the 25–40% benchmark typical for a retail organization of this size, and the total number of applications ran roughly three times higher than industry peers.

Alongside the governance and technology findings, Intellias delivered a set of short- and long-term recommendations — from making domain assignment mandatory at the point of registration to defining a federated governance model with clear decision rights. We laid out a phased path forward: a technical and capability fit assessment next, followed by prioritized modernization and optimization work, and finally a shift to ongoing support and continuous improvement.

To show what that modernization phase could look like in practice, the team also piloted an AI-assisted, spec-driven development approach on one of the legacy systems flagged during the assessment. Used to trace dependencies, surface hidden coupling between modules, and generate refactoring candidates, the application modernization assessment cut requirements definition time by 70% and reduced engineering effort by 55%. The architectural decisions, business context, and risk calls stayed firmly with the human team.

Business outcomes

• A governed, mapped portfolio where there wasn’t one before. 85% of 384 applications now have a clear domain assignment — 268 newly assigned to a product area, and 53 stale or duplicate records identified and removed. This way, the client’s Enterprise Architecture has a foundation to manage the landscape.
• A concrete risk register, not just a governance exercise. The assessment surfaced discontinued compliance tools, undocumented legacy scripts, and an approaching SAP end-of-life wave affecting five core systems. Now, the client has time to plan around potential risks instead of discovering them under pressure.
• A data-backed case study for modernization. 66% of the portfolio turned out to be bespoke-built, well above the 25–40% industry benchmark. The total portfolio came roughly three times larger than a typical retail peer, giving the client’s leadership a clear, evidence-based argument for consolidation and investment.
• A prioritized roadmap the client has agreed to act on. The next phase is a technical and capability fit assessment. It is planned to start once it’s prioritized internally, expected around the end of this year or early next.
• A new kind of engagement with the client. Delivering this assessment stretched the relationship beyond technical execution into strategic advisory work and consulting services, opening the door to further high-trust engagements.
• Proof of what the next phase could deliver. A pilot using AI-assisted, spec-driven development on one of the flagged legacy systems cut requirements definition time by 70% and reduced engineering effort by 55%, giving the client a preview of what the modernization phase could achieve at scale.