Track Technology Usage and Adoption — identify shelfware, zombie technologies, and underutilized investment

Overview

Technology assessment dimensions like technical fitness and security posture each answer a different question about a technology — but none of them directly answer whether it is actually being used. A technology can be technically current and free of known vulnerabilities, and still be consuming licensing and infrastructure cost while producing negligible value because almost no application actually depends on it. Technology Spread analysis, already established elsewhere in this document, is the primary mechanism for closing this specific blind spot.

Best Practice

Use Technology Spread data to identify technologies with adoption well below their licensed or provisioned capacity as shelfware candidates, and technologies with adoption at or near zero dependent applications as zombie technology candidates requiring active verification before retirement. Treat this adoption data as a rationalization input alongside cost, risk, and technical fitness — not a standalone metric — since a technology with low adoption but high strategic or compliance importance, such as a disaster-recovery platform, may be intentionally idle rather than wasteful.

Advance this capability deliberately as TPM maturity grows. At Crawl maturity, manually check adoption for a sample of high-cost or high-license-count technologies during each rationalization review. At Walk maturity, systematically capture adoption data for all licensed technologies on a defined cadence, flagging shelfware and zombie candidates automatically as part of the regular review. At Run maturity, continuously ingest Technology Spread signals and feed adoption data directly into Order-of-Magnitude and rationalization scoring without manual collection.

Benefit(s)

Usage and adoption data exposes a category of waste no other assessment dimension can see on its own — technologies that are technically healthy, formally governed, and still producing little value because nothing actually depends on them. Identifying shelfware surfaces direct opportunities to eliminate license and infrastructure cost. Identifying zombie technologies surfaces low-risk, high-confidence retirement candidates, since a technology with confirmed zero dependent applications carries minimal disruption risk when retired.