What is Application Portfolio Management and why is it important in managing IT value?
Application Portfolio Management is a critical component of IT Portfolio Management and IT Governance. It allows IT to categorize applications and infrastructure in terms of the business and provides a framework for decision making against a backdrop of value vs risk. Application Portfolio Management involves cataloging all assets and categorizing them into logical portfolios and tracking the areas of the business they support along with key performance, cost and value metrics.
The immediate benefit of establishing these types of portfolios is the ability to understand the complete set of assets under management. While powerful for any organization, the most significant impact is found in organizations that have grown by mergers and acquisition or those with decentralized IT operations through visibility into redundant application and infrastructure. Application portfolio management enables strategies to consolidate and reduce costs and leverage best practices throughout an organization.
Leveraging Application portfolios for the portfolio prioritization and selection process also enables organizations to make more informed decisions about new investments by understanding the impact of projects on existing assets and the value they contribute to the business and eliminating the creation of redundant assets.
Ongoing Health Monitoring enables organizations to track and measure key performance and value indicators, such as:
- Alignment with business objectives
- Cost drivers of application support & maintenance
- Risk (outdated technology, availability)
- Client satisfaction with applications
- Usage by client
The capture of these portfolio metrics is critical aspect of enabling the power of Application and Portfolio Management. Capturing this information with accuracy and a minimum of administrative effort requires integrated business management systems that track critical health and value indicators related to the portfolio. This visibility enables organizations to ensure investments are made where required to ensure the needs of the business are met. In addition, this process should be managed within an integrated Portfolio Management solution that enables investment planning for the project portfolio, so organizations can evaluate different scenarios to determine the optimal balance of investments.
Compuware Changepoint optimizes an IT department's ability to govern and maximize the value of the entire IT portfolio of investments including all project and application portfolios. To learn more about how Compuware can enable your organization to maximize IT value, contact us.
|
