Application Simplification - Removing Complexity

 

While IT teams are working hard to deliver business results with their legacy platforms, business demands change at a very fast rate. Peer pressure along with constant market demands through multi-channel operations, customer self-service portals and mobility services have resulted in significant changes in business operations, as compared to a decade ago. Technology advancement has added further challenges to the mix as newer IT solution areas like cloud, Big Data, analytics, mobility and social media are driving businesses to transform themselves in order to increase revenue and retain customers.

 

Future4 can offer support services to business wanting to complete an Application Portfolio Rationalisation (APR). This is a systematic and informed approach to assess and optimise the application landscape in order to address certain transformational business demands or meet certain strategic IT objectives like lowering costs, standardising technology, reducing complexity and improving risk control and information system compliance.

 

• Deciding on the assessment criteria – what are the goals of the assessment, cost reduction, system performance, are just two examples

• Quantitative and qualitative baselining of the portfolio state – what does it do, how does it do it today? What’s our starting point?

• Assessment of baseline information - Once the application portfolio data is collected and validated, the same needs to be analysed using a comprehensive framework. The framework should be nimble and robust enough to be able to be customized according to enterprise level priorities and objectives of APR. During this phase, each application will be scored for core value and fitment from business and IT perspectives, IT risks in its continued operation and cost effectiveness in present state. This activity gives us a profiled and categorized portfolio based on the application scoring. 

• Decision analysis – determine if any of the applications in the suite should be kept based on scores allocated to them following the first three steps and what should happen to the ones no longer deemed fit for purpose

 

APR enables a multitude of benefits to be realized across different levels within the organizations:

 

• Business level: With system homogeneity comes process level standardisation and an opportunity to automate certain business processes, leading to reduced complexity, improved quality of services and greater agility. This helps businesses maintain focus on growth and control and receive accurate, meaningful, consistent and timely information for improved and educated decision making.

• Resources: Simplified and standardised IT operations need reduced or optimized skills and resources. This allows redeployment of skills, reduced head counts and overall improvement in resource utilization.

• IT landscape: Standardised infrastructure enables faster upgrades and scalable platforms while bringing in easier support and maintenance capability.