Opportunity for Change
Owing to its size and multiple mergers and acquisitions, Providence’s IT ecosystem had become increasingly complex, with thousands of legacy applications consuming resources, slowing progress, and elevating cybersecurity risk. The need for a unified, strategic approach to modernize and simplify our digital foundation was clear.
Context
Managing 3,100+ applications across the enterprise led to growing tech debt and unnecessary complexity. Duplicate tools, unmanaged infrastructure, and limited app documentation increased licensing costs, wasted healthcare workers’ time, and expanded our attack surface. This sprawl made modernization difficult and slowed digital transformation, hampering our ability to deliver future-ready digital experiences.
Our Approach
We introduced application rationalization and decommissioning portal, a centralized data-driven platform designed to streamline and strengthen our ecosystem. The platform
- serves as a single system to evaluate, track, and retire redundant or low-value applications.
- is supported by ServiceNow Configuration Management Database to maintain accurate configuration data, ownership visibility, and lifecycle tracking.
- Enables structured methods such as scream tests for unidentified or unmanaged applications, robust change-management processes, and clear migration roadmaps to guide modernization.
Transformative Outcomes
The execution of large-scale servers and app decommissioning was conducted seamlessly with minimal disruption using the portal. As a result, we
- Decommissioned 32,000+ servers
- Retired 2000+ applications and migrated 650 to cloud.
- Saved hefty licensing costs and infrastructure overheads.
- Cut the application portfolio by ~50%, streamlining operations and security.
- Strengthened cybersecurity posture through a smaller, more controlled attack surface
Impact in practice
This integrated approach is helping Providence Global Center build a cleaner, more secure, and more efficient technology landscape—strengthening readiness for the future of care.
By rationalizing and modernizing its application portfolio, Providence eliminated legacy technology debt, reduced costs, improved cybersecurity, and built a lean, cloud-ready environment. This strengthened digital foundation enables faster modernization, and a lean, cloud-ready infrastructure to support the future of care delivery.
