Application Portfolio Rationalization

 

A majority of enterprises have hundreds of applications deployed on their network, but most tend to actively use far fewer than that. This application bloat is a significant and growing problem that costs many organizations millions of dollars a year. Our Application Portfolio
Rationalization (APR) services help determine the best option for each IT application or asset analyzed, based upon its value, from retention to phase-out, remediate (rewrite) or outsource.  Combating application sprawl requires a strategy that allows you to maintain a healthy, continuously rationalized application portfolio. Our APR services focus on seven key areas:Application Portfolio Rationalization

  1. Maintainable applications – Increasing collaboration between the groups involved in application design, development and maintenance will allow you to build applications that are easy to maintain, and give IT the opportunity to streamline operations, reduce costs and achieve greater agility. 
  2. Application Portfolio Governance – A clear governance strategy is a requirement for accurately prioritizing IT demand and keeping IT aligned with business needs. Putting in place portfolio governance practices and tools gives you the ability to review each IT project for a good fit within the overall enterprise architecture.
  3. Business Alignment – The business initiates most application development projects, not IT. This means that IT needs to foster a true “fusion” of business and IT—one that starts with ensuring alignment between business users and the teams that develop and support the applications, but then goes further by allowing IT to become a catalyst and driver for innovation through its increased understanding of the business.
  4. Marketing-  Users often resist adopting new applications. They’re often comfortable with older applications, even if they’re inefficient. It’s not enough to simply build an app. You need users to embrace it. To overcome this resistance, involve business stakeholders when designing the application strategy and ensure that every step of the process—development, phased implementation, introduction and learning—is closely monitored and aligned.
  5. Visibility – Before making changes or embarking on a new product, you need to use analysis and metrics to understand the interrelationships between applications and their dependencies. Automated discovery and relationship mapping tools can help you identify and map the relationships between applications and the underlying infrastructure. Application Performance Management (APM) tools can help you understand who’s using your applications, how they’re using them and what resources they consume. Context is essential. How many users an application has is often far less significant than understanding the business criticality of each specific system and how the application affects the company’s revenue.
  6. Outsource for solutions, not problems – In a recent survey, it was noted that 74 percent of all application portfolios are partially or fully outsourced, but outsourcing may create more problems than it fixes unless you’ve rationalized your portfolio first. Maintaining complex IT systems often requires specialized, local knowledge contained within the company, making the learning curve steep. As a result, your costs could go up despite the fact that the outsourcing provider is benefiting from economies of scale and optimizing the use of resources. To avoid that outcome, rationalization must be an integral part of the engagement.
  7. Lifecycle – If an application is no longer used to support a current business process and its data is no longer growing significantly, it should be retired and its data archived. Doing so will lower energy bills, reduce footprint and free up engineers to focus on developing new, innovative IT systems rather than maintaining outdated ones.