Engagement Options
Application Portfolio Rationalization
In many organizations, applications are deployed and then run forever leading to an endless proliferation of IT systems that is not sustainable. The practice of adding new software applications without retiring old ones will eventually cause the entire IT budget to be consumed by the maintenance and operations burden of legacy applications. So how does an organization understand what applications are worthy of additional investment, replacement or retirement?
Application rationalization is a methodology by which an enterprise can strengthen and optimize its application portfolio. Burton Group applies this methodology to analyze the proposed and existing applications in your portfolio and develops a health rating that shows the relationship between the application’s ability to support the business functional requirements, its technical condition, and a categorization of value-add versus sunk cost spending. The resulting health rating not only identifies applications that exceeded their useful life, but it also provides a critical input for project investment decisions.
For instance, an application enhancement may be proposed for an application that has low functional value to the business. If the proposed enhancement is not correcting the business functional deficiencies, it may not be the best use of funds. Also, if that same application has a low technical condition, then that proposed investment should correct some of the technical deficiencies. If not, these dependencies should be considered to accurately reflect the real enhancement cost. In both cases, IT investment governance is improved.
To perform the assessment, Burton Group consultants work with your team to:
- Review existing portfolio management parameters: health, risk, value, and alignment, balance, and constraints
- Assess the suitability of existing financial metrics
- Establish an objective business value evaluation criteria
- Assess the enterprise architecture, standards and policies and determine the technical evaluation criteria
- Create and distribute application portfolio assessment surveys
- Assemble survey data to create application profiles
- Document assessment summary results
Our analysis identifies the portions of the application portfolio where additional investment should be discouraged or encouraged, and assures that decisions are made based on business value by providing the credible facts upon which executives can make business-based decisions.
The duration and fees for the engagement depends on the number of applications surveyed, the availability of business functional definitions and need for other assistance like project prioritization. To baseline your application portfolio, support cost cutting, or to begin reallocating spending to high value projects, call Homan Farahmand at 905.952.0966.
Other Engagement Options for: Application Development and Cost Control