Include in your Application Portfolio Management approach the business architecture capabilities required to drive customer and stakeholder value and reduce your risk.
Portfolio management produces an asset repository of potential reusable, scalable or not fit-for-purpose technologies. Very often the application portfolio is catalogued based on a criterion of technology “abilities” and does not include the business perspective or desired functionality. Leverage Business Blueprinting and Business Architecture Assessments to inform and enrich APM as a determining factor to continued investment or end of life.
There are three main components to this review engagement
Application Portfolio Rationalization
Over time, application portfolios grow in a divergent fashion as each business function attempts to improve its performance and address its challenges. The result is redundant applications or disparate usage of the same application. Mapping applications (and for larger applications, their lower level functions) to capabilities identifies opportunities for process alignment and reductions in the application portfolio.
Business Blueprinting
Business Architecture uses a business blueprint to identify and measure business value of current assets. (i.e. business capability(s) supported, number of business functions, number of locations, number of core processes and drivers of quality to business value and maintenance costs). This is an incredibly valuable decision support tool as leadership fully understands what they have in their toolkit and how it supports the business when making decisions.
Business Architecture Assessment
Business Architecture Assessments are used in the review of an organization’s current application portfolio to identify gaps in capability, over extension, multiple applications sharing the same business capability or end of life in aggregate. These assessments influence the technology transformation roadmap. This produces business architecture profiles of capability, functionality, where the business is currently not supported by technology and quality of service. These assessments inform the baseline for transformation from a complete perspective.
Duration
Is dependent on the size of the application portfolio under management. Regional, global inventories of less 100 applications might expect a 6-8 week rationalization review engagement
Participants
Business heads or delegates, Application Owners, Business Owner, Application Portfolio Management or Enterprise Architecture, Subject Matter Experts, Business Architects where available
Deliverables
Business Architecture Assessment and APM Matrix model to be used as a framework for APM
Resources
One (1) Business Architecture Consulting Team
High Level Plan
| 1. Analysis | • Interviews and facilitated sessions to establish the business blueprint (capability model) • Access to the Application Inventory or data bases • Interviews with the business owners and application owners |
| 2. Process Definition | • Prioritize the application portfolio based on an agreed criteria for analysis • Generate a socialized and agreed Business Blueprint through facilitated sessions • Map application portfolio to business capabilities • Interview application and business owners to determine capabilities, function, processes, business value, shadow systems, control functions, reporting requirements, workflow • Discover, describe and document ranked and prioritized results • Contribute to the analysis of the tools selection as required |
| 3. Review and Approval | Walkthroughs, at defined project milestones, to review results and work products ensuring the engagement of the stakeholder community and verification, validation, refinement and approval as required |
| 4. Publish | Develop Communication Strategy |
| 5. Roll-out | Develop an Implementation Plan and Roadmap Dashboard as required |
| 6. Manage | Hand off to the ongoing business management unit |