Friday, December 4, 2009

Application Portfolio Management: Are You Getting the Most from your Enterprise Software?

Today's information technology (IT) organizations are faced with the challenge of managing a host of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications, legacy systems, and in-house custom applications. The reality of many of today's IT departments is complex, as they have the immense task of maintaining, managing, integrating, and supporting these business-critical applications. Tracking upgrades and providing first level support, as well as troubleshooting, represent a fraction of the application management challenges. In addition, the applications running a business require consistent inventory tracking, along with monitoring of their performance and the value they bring to the business. Consequently, application portfolio management (APM) has emerged as a critical component of IT governance.

In light of this reality, most IT departments have adopted some form of APM. Managing the development, implementation, training, and support of enterprise applications is central to every IT department. Decisions must be made in terms of prioritizing application projects and tracking their success. However, implementing a governance framework and a product portfolio management (PPM) solution to formalize decisions is still a novel concept to many IT organizations. Consequently, PPM vendors have embraced APM as a key differentiator in their efforts to assist IT organizations in managing their applications as business investments.
APM provides a framework for an organization's enterprise software portfolio. Using PPM methodologies, APM focuses on the application lifecycle to determine which applications should be maintained, retired, or replaced. APM treats enterprise applications as investments, and evaluates their effectiveness based on business needs, client usage, performance, and client satisfaction. APM also takes inventory of an organization's applications, and evaluates their costs, risks, and value.

Like PPM, APM is a methodology for streamlining IT management processes. Thus, APM solutions aim at facilitating the tracking and monitoring of the following business objectives:

1. Inventory management
This requires the identification of applications assets, including technology, versions, upgrades, and customizations. APM software should assist in developing business data, priorities, and categories to track in-house, purchased, and hosted applications.

2. Monitoring and tracking of metrics
This includes the tracking of the cost, quality, and performance of the different applications within an organization. APM software should provide a systematic approach to the tracking of metrics in order to facilitate sound decision-making with respect to IT investments. Many best-of-breed APM solutions, such as CAST Software and HAL Knowledge Solutions, track code-level metrics for in-house applications.

3. Portfolio analysis
This includes the ability to view high-level data of the portfolio of applications to determine their relevance within an organization. APM tools should provide dashboard capabilities and multiple reports (such as bubble graphs) for quick business decisions in terms of the relative importance of applications.

4. Visibility into exceptions
This includes the monitoring of key metrics, such as customer satisfaction, price, and so on. APM solutions typically provide intuitive views and triggers or alerts to carry information about thresholds and changes in these metrics.

5. Help desk management
An important component of APM is its relationship with the help desk application and methodology within an organization. Tracking the day-to-day activities of an organization's help desk (in conjunction with the applications it supports) provides great insight into an application portfolio. APM solutions should be able to extract the appropriate metrics from their help desk solutions.

6. Monitoring and testing of applications
This includes the tracking of the quality and performance of the applications. Once again, APM's relationship to the metrics generated by testing tools will impact the decision-making process as far as the business contribution is concerned (with respect to investment in an application). Tracking these metrics will help organizations to identify issues that will impact their daily operations, such as downtime.


No comments:

Post a Comment