With a growing number of applications for different siloed business processes running across the enterprise, from legacy, custom-built applications to newer boxed products, and with more "must-have, whiz-bang" applications hitting the market, outsourcing and consulting firm Accenture believes it's a question worth considering.

Mark Langlois, a partner in application outsourcing with Accenture, said the issue goes back to the legacy of how IT departments are organized.

"They're set up like application development shops and focus more on building new applications and dropping them off in the business," said Langlois. "Not a lot of thought is put into how you manage all the individual applications."

Langlois said the tools for application inventorying are maturing, aided by the increasing popularity of Web services.

Still, while companies build and deploy new applications each year, they don't often consider disbanding applications.