Technical Architect Role in Sustenance Applicaitons

We cannot have just development projects in this world. Even statistics say the same. Majority of the applications are in maintenance/sustenance stage and main job is to support business with existing IT application. Most of the CIOs target year after year is to reduce the cost of maintenance of IT applications. Do they have visibility into this? DO you know how much percentage of the annual budget is normally kept for running the current IT programs? It is almost 80%. Most of the developers and Architects would like to work on new assignments rather improving the current applications. So there are two ways impacting this. One is developers and Architects interest and other is significant amount of budget spent on this by CIOs. CIOs can take technology help by adopting tools like Application Portfolio Management (APM). So, now the target point of Developers and Architects spending time on Maintenance applications. How many of us are interested to show the improvements in maintenance by performance and cost. Architects need to play important role in this and help the organization to get into the higher profit margins.