Application Rationalization
Of course, while there are other benefits to be had, we should still talk about the biggest use for APM, which is Application Rationalization.
The accumulation of applications is a major challenge for most organizations today, in fact 85% of CIO’s believe their application portfolio needs to be rationalized. This statistic may seem surprising, but decommissioning an application is often a time consuming and expensive process. This may include steps such as extracting data, finding an acceptable way to store / manage the data, often in a new system and managing support and maintenance contracts for both the systems receiving the data and the one being decommissioned. Considering this challenge, and others such as resistance to change from the user community, doing nothing may seem like the easiest decision.
So why do so many CIO’s see a need to rationalize their application portfolio if it is such a challenge? Primarily the reason is cost. Cost in terms of operational such as hosting, support and maintenance, along with the internal cost of application management. Where an organization has multiple systems performing the same function, or worse - systems which aren’t even used, spending money on these systems is waste and a great opportunity to reduce cost without reducing productivity.
Another key factor is opportunity cost. With new innovative technologies such as mobile, social, cloud and big data there is a lot of pressure to channel the IT budget into these technologies which means moving away from legacy applications, and there is a sizeable investment in these legacy applications; maintaining and supporting legacy applications consumes the lion’s share of the budget.
Avoiding the need for Rationalization
The bloating of an application portfolio is extremely common, and the causes are numerous. Some of the common reasons include mergers & acquisitions, poor governance or simply a lack of application investment control. Some valuable management techniques can help limit the number of applications requiring rationalization by ensuring suitable applications are introduced:
Architect for Change: Consider building a simplified, flexible application platform applying standard solutions, SOA or Cloud-based delivery. A simplified system architecture can help improve productivity, cut costs, and channel resources toward innovation
Capture Business Requirements: Ensure alignment between business and IT by capturing, organizing, and managing requirements. Establish a risk-based application delivery approach to help you assess and prioritize the highest risk, highest-priority requirements so you can optimize your development and testing efforts based on business risk
Ensure Applications function as intended: The sooner you detect defects, the less it costs to fix them. Starting your quality process as early as possible, and incorporating all aspects of quality into your lifecycle will help ensure that your applications work as expected, and remain reliable and secure
Establish a Governance Process: Portfolio Management can help businesses focus on core activities while staying informed about all aspects of project and application health. It lets you govern your entire portfolio of IT projects, opportunities, and operational work in real-time with effective collaborative processes
Retire Applications while maintaining access to Data: Building retirement and archiving practices into the application lifecycle and implementing enterprise content and data management systems would help keep application and data growth in check. Importantly, it will prevent reoccurrence of similar problems in the future
Even when following best practices for application management, rationalization will be required for the foreseeable future. Organizations regularly introduce new standards and strategies; applications evolve rapidly with underlying technologies changing equally as quickly and business requirements change for a variety of reasons. Whatever the reason, the need for application rationalization is clear and the opportunities, if difficult to realize, are plentiful.
Approaches to Application Rationalization
To better understand application rationalization, we should understand how to approach to rationalization.
It may seem strange, but the best path towards succeeding with application rationalization is to use the right application. An enterprise architecture tool with a central repository, such as iServer365, will drastically improve the ability to execute on rationalization. The following steps have been designed with this in mind.