Application Portfolio Management Services

Most well-established companies have amassed a complex infrastructure of applications, including both new and legacy systems. Their application portfolios become increasingly costly to support and maintain, and enhancements and integration of new solutions become more and more difficult to implement. This inflexibility and costly support fails to provide the ROI expected by the business. IBM's Application Portfolio Management Services are designed to help you meet these challenges, and transform your application portfolio to more closely align to the business and respond quickly to business change.

Highlights

• Align the application inventory with business direction and focus resources on strategic priorities
• Simplify and streamline existing application assets
• Improve quality and functional capability
• Manage the transformation of the legacy portfolio to respond quickly and efficiently to business changes
• Reduce maintenance and support costs and improve IT investment decisions.

Application Portfolio Management is the process of continually assessing and evaluating the IT portfolio based on balanced business and technical ROI criteria, then managing the transformation to align the portfolio with the strategic needs of the business.

In today's rapidly changing and competitive marketplace, complex application portfolios must be transformed to align with and support the demands of the business. Typical problem areas include the legacy of duplicate applications - often the result of mergers or acquisitions - which increase the cost and complexity of implementing new requirements. Similarly, past pressures to deliver solutions rapidly may have created a legacy of tactical solutions rather than a structured application portfolio. Additional interfaces to support these solutions add yet more complexity to an already unstructured applications architecture.

Yet no enterprise can afford, nor wait for, large-scale strategic replacement of the applications portfolio. More cost effective solutions must be found to portfolio transformation.

IBM Application Portfolio Management Services help companies rapidly and efficiently transform their IT environments to align more directly with business priorities. As an example, portfolio assessment and optimisation are key preparatory measures toward the successful implementation of e-business on demand - a next generation business model characterised by fully integrated and highly responsive systems, real-time communications and dynamic, reactive service, support and collaboration.

The assessment process is the core of aligning the application portfolio with the business direction. ROI is evaluated in 3 critical ways:

• Strategic alignment: How well does the application satisfy both business strategy and technical direction? The objective here is not to eliminate conflicts of directions, but to understand them and have a systematic way of evaluating and documenting impact
• Technical quality: relates to the application component's performance (ability to process effectively), reliability (ability to meet business service level availability expectations) and supportability (can the component be serviced/enhanced cost effectively), plus its ability to interact and be integrated with other technical components
• Business quality: Refers to the level at which a component supports the business objectives in terms of functionality, capability and accuracy. Does the component support the business function in an efficient manner? Does the component produce consistently accurate results? Does the component support integrated business processes (sharing of information/results across business boundaries) cost effectively?

These criteria can be applied to any component of the application portfolio, for example Packaged software or custom applications. Based on assessment results, informed decisions can be made regarding the direction of a particular application component:

• Upgrade: Get next version of a packaged application
• Grow: Enhance functionality to support the balanced needs of the organisation better
• Integrate: Merge or integrate application functionality with other portfolio components to improve IT support to the business
• Sunset: Retire the application component and migrate or consolidate the functionality as required.

The output of the assessment is a strategic road map for portfolio management and transformation.

Managing the transformation drives the implementation of the strategic portfolio road map with ongoing transformation management and governance of the application portfolio to ensure and measure the business value of the portfolio transformation strategy against identified objectives.

Going forward, it is vital that the portfolio is reassessed periodically to ensure it continues to support changing business priorities. Re-assessment should also take place after major business changes, e.g., mergers or acquisitions.

If you would like to find out more about IBM's Application Portfolio Management Services complete the attached contact form.