IT Application Management: Building Your Application Portfolio

Summary

When it comes to IT in the enterprise, it can’t be understated: knowledge is power. With regards to the practice of IT Application Management, knowing exactly who is using what can empower you to better visualize your IT landscape and understand your organization’s infrastructure. This insight can help you eliminate redundancies, reduce costs, add capabilities and improve overall application efficiency. Just as youd scrutinize your financial portfolio to make sure you are getting the best return on investment, it’s important to analyze your IT Application Portfolio to make sure your organization’s applications are best serving your business needs.

The hardest step may be simply starting the process itemizing an application portfolio for an organization that has been operating and growing for 10-15 years can be daunting and we’ve seen different organizations take different approaches depending on their environment and what goals they aim to achieve. These approaches typically fall within two categories: The Manual Route, where organizations invest resources to building their application portfolio or The Automated Route, where organizations invest in software to do the up-front work for them.

Surprisingly enough, the Automated Route isn’t always the best solution while it provides a more efficient and sustainable solution over time, it may not be the most effective method for achieving your end results in a desired timeline.  Below we’ll provide some insight into both approaches and find which route might be more suited to meet your needs.  Certainly, a hybrid of the two may also work well.

  1. The Manual Route 

Going the Manual Route means working with the various application owners and teams in your organization to map out what applications are being used, what are the known dependencies, and highlighting any related systems or infrastructure.  While this is a more manually intensive effort up-front, Ive found that you can get to the 75-90% confidence level in data rather quickly when you get in front of the right people.  Additional confidence can be gained by using supplemental skills and data for efforts such as infrastructure profiling.

If your goal is to get information that is “good enough” and not deal with the technical specifications of every application, this may be the approach for you.