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It should come as no surprise to Enterprise Architects everywhere that aligning IT with the wider business functions is key. Perhaps one area where this becomes particularly apparent and delivers significant benefits is when it comes to Application Portfolio Management.
It’s not enough to simply keep half an eye on a (quite likely outdated) list of tooling and hope that the application owners within the business functions do their part managing the technology.
The business needs to be enabled with the tools and technology required to achieve its strategic business initiatives, and that’s where Application Portfolio Management (APM) comes in.
Are you just mitigating risk, or proactively striving to add value?
At a fundamental level, Application Portfolio Management can help IT organizations and Enterprise Architecture to identify overlapping application functionality and then rationalize or consolidate IT costs.
It also helps to safeguard continuity, by giving insight into potential application risk (for example in the form of security risks, service provisions and legacy technology). From a business risk perspective, this all makes sense.
But truly effective Application Portfolio Management takes this a step further and helps the organization not just mitigate risk but proactively realize value from their application landscape.
By capturing the links, relationships and dependencies between the application portfolio and the functions, processes and projects they support, decisions around technology can be made much more proactively, strategically, and with the required speed.
Take the Application Portfolio Management (APM) Maturity Test
At ValueBlue, we work with a wide range of organizations that use our software tool, BlueDolphin, to gain control of their application landscape. We typically see that new customers operate at certain levels of Application Portfolio Management (APM) ‘maturity’.
We wanted to give you the opportunity to assess your own organization’s APM maturity score, so we’ve developed a quick APM Maturity Test. By answering a few quick questions, you’ll receive an APM maturity score based on your organization’s current application landscape and how effectively it’s being managed and maintained.
Bear in mind that the test is high level and takes the key factors per maturity stage into account – if you’d like to discuss your result (or your APM efforts in general) we’d be more than happy to hear from you.