The cheapest migration is the one you skip

In one assessment, about a third of the application estate had no clear owner.

Nobody could say who used it, what it fed, or what would break if it stopped. Some of it was still being patched, backed up, and paid for. A few of those systems were on the migration plan, with a wave number and an estimate.

You don’t migrate that. You retire it. Or at least you ask the question out loud before you spend money moving it.

The cheapest migration is always the one you don’t do. That sounds obvious until you’re inside a programme with a deadline, a budget, and a wave plan that everyone signed. At that point the incentive is to move everything and sort it out later. Later never has budget.

What I’ve come to do instead: before waves, before tooling, before the first lift and shift, run a simple ownership pass. Every application gets a named owner or gets a retirement date. No third option.

It is uncomfortable. Owners appear for things nobody wanted to own, because the alternative is losing them. That’s fine. That’s the point. Now you know what you’re actually migrating.

The assessment that found $4.5M didn’t find it in pricing. It found it in questions like this one.

How much of your estate has a named owner today?