Ministry of Defence gives 150 apps their marching orders

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) hopes to save £10m by cutting 150 unnecessary software applications.

The MoD application rationalisation project is part of the Defence Information Exploitation programme which runs alongside the Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) programme, which aims to deliver a consolidated IT infrastructure across the Army, Royal Air Force and Royal Navy.

The MoD identified more than 1,000 applications that it would need to move over to the new integrated infrastructure, and IT consultancy Detica was brought in to identifying savings that could be made as part of the migration.

Ian Henderson, application rationalisation project manager at the MoD, said in a statement: "Each application that we move to the new network incurs costs for testing, installation, integration and support and maintenance, and it seemed logical to eliminate any programs that were not being used to their full potential."

The MoD put together a list of the applications that employees were using, and Detica used this to hold workshops with users to investigate further.

So far, Detica has identified more than 150 applications that can be removed from the network including library management systems and graphics packages. For example the MoD was using more than 30 different applications to run libraries across the world and the project has narrowed this down to seven, and reduced the number of graphics software packages in use from 25 to five.