The application portfolio in mature organisations represents a very significant investment over an extended period. Expenditure can easily run into hundreds of millions or even billions. This can be a major asset to leverage to produce value, or a major problem that consumes resources and funds.
Managers, architects and analysts often don’t know where to begin or where to focus to improve value delivered and the contribution of the portfolio to strategic goals. Two things that can help are Taxonomy and a Landscape Health Assessment.
Taxonomy is a common architecture technique where we use a set of categories (usually capability or functional) to organise the baseline applications so that we can detect redundancy (multiple things doing the same job), gaps (where we do not have something or the current solution is not adequate) and opportunities (where there is something useful but it is not widely deployed; or there is an easy “off the shelf” solution for a gap). A good starting Taxonomy can often be obtained as an industry or domain reference model.
A Maturity Model is less common. In fact, several years ago we were doing a consulting assignment and looked in vain for a “maturity model” or “portfolio review model” for the application landscape. In the end we created one which we have used since. I recently revised this to include guidance based upon findings (as we have for other models including our Data Management Maturity Model) and we have automated it on our Maturity Model Platform, in turn based upon our Enterprise Value Architect tooling.
This provides a quick, guided, automated way to move from little knowledge to a robust view on the application portfolio status; scores on several important health dimensions; and recommendations of actions to improve the health of the portfolio and value delivery to the business. The instrument also looks at strategic issues and leveraging technology. For a limited time, you can try it free. You can save results, retrieve them in future and compare them over time or scenarios.
Take the Application Landscape Assessment
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