Removed: “more than 230 potential application retirements” from 1,005 application surveys, and 28 contracts over three years.
Outcome: $8.1 million a year in verified savings, $7.2 million of it from retiring those 28 contracts — “These are confirmed savings, not projected estimates”.
Austin, Texas, counted what it owned before deleting anything. In April 2026 the city’s Audit and Finance Committee was shown the output of a rationalisation run across all 47 departments — 1,005 application surveys, 5,653 IT contracts and 2,895 contracts tied to applications — reduced to 24 consolidation initiatives and, in the deck’s words, “more than 230 potential application retirements”.
The bigger figures on the same slide — a full-program $49 million to $142 million a year — are labelled negotiation-dependent and projection, and they are not the ones to quote. Two things in the plan matter more than the money. New applications now pass through two intake gates, one of which is a security and compliance review, with portfolio growth targeted at about 5% a year against a historical 12-15%; and the deck warns against its own success: without “ongoing process discipline and staffing, the portfolio grows again through the same decentralized decision making that created the current state”.
Source: City of Austin, Audit and Finance Committee presentation, 15 April 2026 (15 April 2026)