Today, businesses in every sector are looking to reduce the cost of operations and, at the same time, attract, serve and satisfy valuable customers. As executives focus anew on identifying and evaluating opportunities for cost savings, they are examining the enterprise application portfolio.
Having said this, in many companies’ current application portfolios are aging, and the size and complexity of these assets can make them difficult and costly to maintain. In many cases, these applications lack integration and the ability to scale or evolve.
It is our opinion that aligning application portfolio with business strategies can help companies prioritise application development, reconcile requirements across the organisation and strenghen their competitive advantage.
Application portfolio management involves continuous assessment of the application portfolio in terms of business value, enhancement potential, cost and technology concerns. Such comprehensive evaluations help facilitate strategic application development, maintenance, transformation and retirement, which in turn, can help companies:
- Reduce costs and optimise value;
- Align the application portfolio with business strategies;
- Standardise business practices;
- Implement shared services;
- Increase speed-to-development and speed-to-market;
- Prioritise maintenance activities and approval requirements;
- Rationalise complex and/or undocumented code in critical applications;
- Decrease the cost of future application maintenance through competitive outsourcing and/or the use of global resources;
- Retiring redundant, outdated or low-value applications.
Application portfolio management is not a static, one time exercise; rather, it is a continual and evolutionary process involving the assessment, rationalisation, categorisation and disposition of applications to achieve better strategic alignment with the business, higher usability and lower costs.
Our approach
Using Optimyth's checKing APM, companies can transform their application portfolios – by activities such as upgrading, growing, retiring or consolidating those systems – with a focus on fulfilling strategic transformation initiatives.
This process requires:
- Portfolio assessment: Collection of all relevant application portfolio information, analyse the information in the context of business and technical objectives and identifying the transformation opportunities;
- Portfolio transformation management: Identifying the key business drivers, providing governance and sequencing over transformation projects and activities and measuring the business value of transformation projects against identified objectives.
Optimyth Professional Services offers a truly comprehensive set of services designed to help organisations achieve their business objectives while reducing operational costs.
