Application Portfolio Management

Business Benefits of Application Portfolio Management (APM)

Govern your application portfolio for continuous alignment, compliance, and outsourcing management

The core business processes of your organization are automated by sophisticated applications. But as it matures, the application portfolio tends to become increasingly complex and difficult to manage. This complexity is compounded by a decline in technical and business understanding of how the application portfolio manages your business.

This can hinder your ability to identify where software diverges from business needs. These priorities could be for flexible business processes, high efficiency, compliance with regulations, constant availability, or perhaps increased security. It also makes realignment activities difficult and risky to execute.

Your application portfolio matters to your business because it automates your business. As a result, it is imperative that you manage the portfolio from a business perspective. In some cases, understanding technical metrics like complexity and size will be useful for your management decisions. But in other cases, you will want to manage with business-level data like cost, value, and risk -- combined with technical metrics.

Further, portfolio management decisions are often more powerful when made via a business filter. For instance, it may be valuable to understand cost and complexity for a given application. But it is far more powerful to understand how your key performance indicators relate to a business process, geography, or other grouping that is meaningful to management.

Relativity Technologies Enables Application Portfolio Management (APM)

Relativity Technologies can help. Our industry-leading Modernization Workbench® enables users to identify where value, cost, and risk exist within your application portfolio. Users can view this information through a business lens by connecting metrics to overarching business contexts, like business process, geography, business problem, or other meaningful grouping.

Meaningful metrics and insights about the application portfolio can be 'rolled-up' to multiple levels in the organization -- including business management. These views enable users to make critical IT governance decisions about where these misalignments exist, measure the degree of misalignment to determine priorities, and execute application modernization and application maintenance activities to boost application portfolio alignment. These activities may involve outsourcing a non-core process to a third party, replacing a system with a packaged application, or perhaps disaggregating systems into a service-oriented architecture.

The Application Portfolio Manager module centralizes business and technical intelligence for portfolios across mainframe, mid-range, and distributed environments. Browser-based, customizable dashboards provide trended metrics that highlight misalignments between business requirements and the application portfolio. Management, CIOs, line of business managers, analysts, and developers can use this data to intelligently prioritize and execute application modernization initiatives.

Application Portfolio Management to Govern Misalignments

The Modernization Workbench offers managers browser-based access to dashboards of trended business and technical metrics. Managers can browse through metrics and analysis that highlight where applications diverge from business priorities like efficiency, adaptability, security, risk, or availability. This can be especially useful in an outsourcing model to ensure that service providers comply with service level agreements.

Then, unlike alternative approaches to application portfolio management, managers can drill-down within a business context to program and code levels to more effectively locate and correct misalignments.

Make Business-centric Application Portfolio Management Decisions

The value of your enterprise application portfolio stems from how it supports your business. As a result, making decisions about Enterprise Application Modernization in the context of what operations an application automates, or what geography manages them, or whether they support a secure operation is key. To prioritize alignment or legacy application modernization activities managers must know where cost, value, and risk exist within the application portfolio.

The Modernization Workbench collects and consolidates diverse business and technical metrics to support governance decisions. Application size and complexity metrics such as cyclomatic complexity and function points are collected from sources. The platform also provides a survey facility for gathering information from stakeholders. It also enables integration with third party software such as project management tools to collect cost, change frequency, and other relevant indicators.

This information can be categorized based on the business contexts defined during the application understanding stage, providing more meaningful metrics. So, users can immediately see, for example, which outsourcer manages the most complex software, or which business processes are most at risk of 'downtime'. Interactive dashboards present the collected and filtered data to the right users in the organization. This allows CIOs, application managers, architects, and others to make more informed development and alignment decisions.

Managers can readily access business process models and business rule documentation from the Modernization Workbench to achieve this rich insight. This complete understanding of embedded business logic is simply not provided by alternative approaches to managing the application portfolio.

Act on Application Portfolio Management Decisions

Making management decisions about the modernization and maintenance of your enterprise application portfolio is only the first step. Your organization must now act on the selected strategies in order to achieve the promised value. While other solutions leave you with no alternative, the Modernization Workbench enables the entire Enterprise Application Modernization lifecycle through the acceleration of a broad range of modernization and maintenance initiatives. Users can continue to monitor and trend APM data to facilitate continuous improvement.