Portfolio Rationalization

Application Lifecycle Planning is a sequel to an Application Portfolio Analysis exercise. It is critical in Enterprise Architecture where a roadmap is created to achieve a business aligned IT portfolio. The principles behind this exercise are availability of data across the organization and lowering total cost of ownership. The important factors are the level of continued support by vendors, if so involved, as also production support staff, and the consequent total cost of maintaining ageing applications. The harsh reality is that often legacy applications are not rtetired despite new replacement applications being put in place.

The choice of new technology for the “target” portfolio also uses the easy availability of skills resources, as a factor, for new development and support.  On the technology front, trends in legacy modernization include the use of ORM tools and converting old business logic into XML web services resulting in a database agnostic service oriented architecture.

 What we do

  • Analyse the application portfolio based on business and technology scores
  • Take inputs from the business technology workshop
  • Classify applications based on strategic impact and operational value
  • Recommend application lifecycle for the present portfolio
  • Present plan for modernization, consolidation and retiring applications
  • How we do
    • Based on the criteria defined for application portfolio analysis, we determine the stage in the lifecycle for each portfolio application
    • Understand the business goals, short and long term, and map onto the functionality of each application
    • Understand levels of support and availability of support staff, and cost of maintenance of the portfolio
    • Recommend modernization for business critical application, consolidation for important “utility” applications and retirement for applications that are no longer in use or have a low strategic score
    • Create a sequential roadmap for portfolio consolidation

 Key take aways:  

  • Take a forward looking view on current portfolio
  • Recommend application lifecycle for all portfolio apps
  • Present plan for app retirement based on clear metrics
  • Predict lifecycle and recommend replacement strategies

 

Manage Outcomes