And the hand never goes up..

No matter how big your IT department is or how big your company,  this classical problem exists. in some form or shape.  The fact is, there are applications that all over the place   but have no documented owners or point of contact. While some users may be using these applications, there is no single point of contact who really cares about the overall health of this application.

As no one really cares for it, its never on a upgrade path either.

Because of its shear existnace there will be integrations(data coming in and going out of this application database).

Now image your are entrusted with the tasks of upgrading one of the upstream applications which will signnifcantly impact this downstream application

You would like to find out the owner of this application but all your efforts have ended in vain.

So what do you do..where do you go from here..

1) Try to see who are all the people accessing this application. To find out, send an email to all the employees of the company asking how they use this downstream application. You are lucky if you get any reply.  Next try to find out who originally developed this application and where can you find some more information on this( Wiki’s, Livelinks or CMS).

2) If you don’t get any response for your question, send an email and tell everyone that you will be shutting down the application two days from now and they have to contact you if they have any concerns. With this kind of a time sensitive email the chances are you will get a response.

3) Assuming Step #1 and Step #2 did not work, You can turn application tracking on,  to see who is logging in? If there is a back end database try turning Auditing ON. Also database links will give you some great clues.

As you get closer to upgrading your own application, continue with broadcast emails and other forms of communication. This is to make sure that you have enough documentation just in case the table turns against you later.

Finally just a few days before you go live, shutdown all the intergrations to see if any user complains( this is little dangerous and you got to have your management’s approval to do this, but then again this is very much doable if you show enough proof that you did try finding the owners of this application).

Years ago I was managing an LDAP upgrade which was authenticating/authorizing 1600 employees and numerous applications. Can you imagine the nightmare.

I followed everything i just mentioned above..

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