One day, God appeared before a CIO and said, “Dear CIO, you have been a wonderful person. I am pleased with you, and I would like to grant you three wishes.”

Naturally, the CIO was very pleased. After some thought, and being a modest person at heart, he said, “Lord, my aspirations are not huge. I would be very happy and bless Your name forever if You could fill these three wishes:

1. I want a bigger home.
2. I am planning a family vacation and need vacation money. And,
3. I want my family to be happy.”

“These are very reasonable wishes,” God said. “I will be happy to grant them.”

God then magically created red and green garbage bags and handed them to the CIO, saying:

“Go forth and examine each of your household items. Put everything that you have not used for the last three years and don’t need in the Red Garbage Bag, and put everything that you have not used for the last three years but might need again in the Green Garbage Bag.”

And the CIO went forth and did as God commanded. He examined each and every item in his house and collected all those items his family had not used in three years into the Red and Green Garbage Bags. Once that was done, God appeared again and said, “Take the items in the Green Garbage Bag and place them in the garage for inexpensive storage. But the items in the Red Garbage Bag, sell them on eBay.”

And the CIO went forth and did as God commanded. Then God said, “Look ye at thy house.” And the CIO looked and found that his house seemed larger and cleaner with less number of things in his house.

And God said, “Take the money from the items sold and use that for your vacation.” And the CIO was happy.

Then God said, “And to fulfill your third wish, go and show your wife and your children what has been wrought.” And the CIO went to his wife and children and said, “Behold, for the Lord has worked a miracle. Our house has more room, and we have money for our vacation.” And his wife and children rejoiced. And the CIO praised God for granting his wishes. And it was the seventh day, and the CIO rested from his labors.

And on Monday the CIO returned to his data center and looked around. And behold, he realized that he wanted a larger data center, and he wanted money to give a bonus to his employees, and he wanted his employees to be happy. And he realized that as he had done at home, so should he do at work. So he called together his executive team and said unto them, “Go through our data center and our IT environment and identify every item we have not used in the last three years, both physical and logical items. And tag those items that we might need again with a green tag and those items we will not need with a red tag.”

And the executive team went forth, but they found that the data center had so many applications that no one knew what many of them were doing or which might be needed and which might not. And so they came back to him and said, “Verily we have struggled mightily with this task, but we are not able to complete it, for we cannot be sure which applications we need and which applications we do not.”

So the CIO retired into his sanctum and prayed to God, saying, “Lord, as at home, so at work; I wish to apply Thy Divine Wisdom to make my data center larger, raise money for things we need, and boost morale. But we cannot tell the sheep from the goats, the applications we need from the applications we do not. We need help!”

And the Lord harkened to the plea of His servant and said, “Check ye with www.solix.com and ask them for their help, for behold, Solix EDMS can help thee understand enterprise applications, and sunset older applications and systems while retaining the data through the miracle of XML data archiving.”

And the CIO called his team together and told them what God had said. And the team rejoiced and used Solix EDMS to:

• Reduce infrastructure, making space for new systems without additional space, power or cooling requirements;
• Save bottom line expenses, which provided money for a bonus for the entire team;
• Increase team morale by eliminating aging, increasingly problematic systems and streamlining work routines throughout the organization.

The moral of the story: We are often so forward-looking in IT that we seldom look back at what we have accumulated over the years. When we do, we are surprised at what we find in our data centers that is taking up valuable space, power, cooling, and staff attention. This often includes collections of old applications that have been superseded by newer solutions but never shut down or that have lost their purpose to changing business needs. Sunsetting older applications and systems is a well recognized good practice that is too seldom followed, in part because manually analyzing all those applications to find the candidates for sunsetting and then manually archiving the data just in case it is needed again is labor intensive and expensive. However, Solix EDMS can automate the process by running data analytics across all enterprise applications and databases to discover those that are not being accessed or updated. Once you understand all your data, you can identify candidates for application sunsetting and data archiving, creating the basis for a more agile infrastructure and for scaling the platform to support e-discovery, data quality improvement and business intelligence.