Stage 3: Current-State Assessment

Before Acme asks the market for proposals, it needs to understand its own environment well enough to ask sensible questions.

What This Stage Is

This is where Acme documents the current estate. In our hypothetic case, let’s say it includes:

The Current-State Assessment means creating a fact-based picture of:

Area	Description
Technology landscape	What exists today
Application landscape	What applications are there, who owns them, how critical they are, what dependencies they have
Operating model	How teams work today, who approves what, where delays happen, how incidents and changes are handled
Cost baseline	What the current environment costs and where the money goes
Risk baseline	What security, compliance, operational, and resilience issues exist

Based on the Organization scale and structure, these roles may exist independantly or be merged. However, the basic idea remains the same.

Role	Description
Infrastructure operations teams	They know servers, storage, networks, backups, and support models
Application owners	They know what the applications do and how sensitive they are
Service management team	They know incident, request, change, and service processes
Finance and commercial teams	They help establish current cost and contract baselines
Security and risk teams	They identify control weaknesses and audit concerns
Enterprise architects	They connect the dots across all these domains
Data center, platform, and network specialists	They provide specific technical inputs

This often happens when the internal organization lacks:

This stage should produce real artifacts, not vague opinions. Typical outputs include:

This stage is often weak because companies overestimate how well they understand their own estate.

Typical issues:

Remember: If the current-state assessment is weak, the Request for Proposal will be weak.