Mature organizations often have that all-encompassing, business-critical application that represents person-decades of effort. It likely started as a very well-defined, well-implemented solution to original business requirements, but over time became a behemoth as functionality was added without considering the overall impact.

Unsurprisingly, the application has not aged well and eventually leadership admits there are problems:

* consistently increasing production bugs that require immediate attention;
* dramatic increase in time required to deliver new features;
reliance on key individuals to do critical work due to cognitive complexity;
* inability to successfully monitor application to understand its true state.

Legitimately, organizations are loathe to accept that a rewrite is required; it's often interpreted as engineers wanting to do engineering for engineering's sake. Leadership makes a call to action to find a less-costly and more timely solution. After much analysis, discussion, deliberations and hand-wringing, it's decided: Demonolith the Monolith!

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