Application Portfolio Management (APM) White Paper

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Over time, the applications that automate your business fall out of alignment with strategic requirements. This can imperil the ability of your organization to adapt to new market opportunities and challenges.

This paper discusses how best practices for measuring and monitoring your software assets in order to identify priorities for modernization and maintenance activities.

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Business Problem

Core business processes are automated by sophisticated applications. As these software assets mature, they tend to become increasingly complex and poorly understood from a business and technical perspective. This makes it difficult to adapt software assets to support changing corporate priorities. It also leads to an increasing gap between what the business expects its operations to do, and how the underlying applications actually behave.

To bring applications back into alignment requires information. CIOs must detect where misalignments exist, measure the degree of misalignment to determine priorities, and execute modernization activities that bring alignment. This requires that the right decision makers be presented with business-centric metrics about the cost, value, and risk of their existing applications.

This information could come from diverse sources: source code analysis, financial tools, or stakeholder surveys, for instance. By consolidating and presenting this data to users through a business filter, they can more intelligently invest scarce resources in order to encourage alignment with business requirements. This is Application Portfolio Management (APM).

Solution: Application Portfolio Manager

Application Portfolio Manager is an integrated module of the Modernization Workbench. It centralizes business and technical intelligence about applications -- 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 Application Portfolio Management (APM) data to intelligently prioritize and execute application modernization initiatives.

With the Modernization Workbench you can:

• Collect Diverse Metrics: Users can consolidate a diverse array of metrics to support their decision process. Measurements such as cyclomatic complexity, essential complexity, etc. are generated by the Modernization Workbench and presented in Application Portfolio Manager. Users can also create and deploy questionnaires to collect information from stakeholders. Or, users can connect third-party software like HR-management tools to import relevant data.
• Filter Based on Business Context: Decisions about where to invest within the application portfolio rise to a strategic level only when they are placed in proper business context. That is, a manager may want to know how complexity versus change requests varies over time for an outsourcing provider. Or, a manager may want to gauge the cost and risk associated with the software that automates a critical business process. Application Portfolio Manager facilitates this by ‘rolling up’ metrics collected from any source based on different contexts or abstractions.
• Act on Decisions: Users are presented with dashboards that summarize the collected metrics. A CIO can be presented with a high-level overview of the application portfolio, and can drill-down to an application manager view that focuses on a subset of the application portfolio. Because Application Portfolio Manager integrates with the other modules of the Modernization Workbench, users can quickly transition from setting alignment priorities to acting on them.

This Application Portfolio Management (APM) capability ensures that users can more effectively identify, prioritize, and execute application modernization initiatives.