Application Portfolio Manager™
Application Portfolio Manager offers business intelligence on application portfolios
Application Portfolio Manager helps users - from the CIO to development staff - to identify and prioritize development activities to realign applications with business goals.
Customizable dashboards trend key performance indicators like application cost, value, and risk to help locate challenges and quickly refocus development teams on business priorities.
Application Portfolio Management Business Value
It is imperative that your application portfolio supports management goals. These priorities could be for flexible business processes, high efficiency, compliance with regulations, availability and stability, or perhaps increased security. Regardless of your priority, you need business intelligence on where development teams should be focused.
Application Portfolio Manager consolidates business intelligence on your application portfolio from multiple sources. Application metrics, stakeholder surveys, and information from third-party technologies provides the only business-centric approach to Application Portfolio Management. It delivers:
Your business must be managed from multiple perspectives. Business users want to understand the adaptability and efficiency of their business processes. Security chiefs want to ensure that security threats are understood and confronted. Outsourcing managers need to ensure that provider companies adhere to service level agreements.
The Modernization Workbench allows users to overlay business contexts onto their application portfolio. Metrics are grouped by overarching business processes, geographies, or other useful business contexts. As a result, business intelligence about the application portfolio can be 'rolled-up' into meaningful metrics that support business decisions.
Effective management depends on effective measurement. Application Portfolio Manager allows users to collect and consolidate information from diverse sources, depending on your needs. Information can be consolidated based on business contexts, and metrics can be combined and calculated based on your internal standards.
- Technical Metrics:: The Modernization Workbench automatically dozens of technical metrics about the size and complexity of software assets. Industry standard metrics like cyclomatic complexity, degree of dependencies, and function points provide insight into how difficult it is to adapt software to support shifting business requirements. Measures can be customized and combined with other key performance indicators, instantly highlighting where stability, availability, or flexibility are at risk.
- Stakeholder Intelligence: Subject matter expert opinions about software cost, risk, and value are critical for decision-making. A manager may decide which systems to focus development effort on based on survey results regarding the business value of the software that supports a given business process. Application Portfolio Manager provides a facility for creating and distributing browser-based questionnaires to subject matter experts. Responses are collected and consolidated through the module.
- Other Key Performance Indicators: Data from other systems can be a key indicator of where misalignments exist. For instance, users may wish to pull change frequency data to determine which systems are most prone to breakdown. Or, perhaps costing data can be used to determine where efficiency gains would be most pronounced. Application Portfolio Manager provides an import facility and a flexible knowledgebase that can accept outside data.
Leveraging the business groupings that we have defined, we can consolidate metrics into useful key performance indicators. For instance, users can assign cost data to a given geography. Technical metrics regarding the same group of software assets can also be connected, offering integrated governance of the software and the region that manages it.
This business intelligence is especially useful for outsourcing managers to monitor adherence to service level agreements. Similarly, business process managers can use the data to ensure that applications are supported core operations.
The CIO may need a high-level view on the status of the portfolio. An application manager may be more interested in performance trends for the software that supports her line of business. An application outsourcing manager may want to control provider performance versus benchmarks. As a result, each user will require different information in different formats.
The module provides customizable, browser-accessible dashboards. Users can rely on different perspectives and focuses, depending on their specific need. Authorized users can drill-down into their dashboards, going as deep, or as high, as needed. The collected data is trended over time, helping each user to spot and correct misalignments with business goals.
As misalignments with your business goals become clear, it is important to act on these challenges. Unlike other solutions that provide no value in the modernization and maintenance stage, the Modernization Workbench speeds realignment activities. Because Application Portfolio Manager shares the same application knowledgebase as the other tools of the Modernization Workbench, users can efficiently transition from selecting application modernization activities to executing them.
| CIOs have instant access to business-level intelligence about the application portfolios. |
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Managers can 'zoom-in' to a business context to refine priorities and scope projects. |
 | Metrics can be easily tracked and trended over time, allowing users to monitor adherence to Service Level Agreements and spot issues.
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