Application portfolio management (APM)
An application portfolio starts with creating an inventory or catalog of all the applications in use. This includes documenting information such as application name, purpose, version, vendor, architecture, dependencies, and any relevant details. It provides a comprehensive overview of the applications within the organization, support critical business processes, improve efficiency, enhance customer experience, enable collaboration, or address specific organizational needs.
An application portfolio refers to the collection of all software applications used by an organization to achieve its goals and objectives. It encompasses a wide range of applications, including:
Internal Business Applications: These applications support core business functions like accounting, human resources, customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise resource planning (ERP).
Web Applications: This category includes web-based applications used by employees or customers to interact with the organization online.
Mobile Applications: Organizations might have mobile apps for employees, customers, or partners to access functionalities on the go.
Legacy Systems: Some organizations still rely on older, mission-critical applications that might not have been updated for years.
Custom-Developed Applications: In addition to commercially available software, organizations might have custom applications developed to meet their specific needs.
Importance of Application Portfolio Management:
Managing an application portfolio effectively (often referred to as Application Portfolio Management or APM) is crucial for several reasons:
Cost Optimization: By understanding the applications used across the organization, IT teams can identify redundancies and opportunities to consolidate or eliminate unnecessary software, leading to cost savings.
Improved Efficiency: A well-managed portfolio ensures applications are aligned with business needs and that resources are allocated efficiently to support the most critical applications.
Enhanced Security: APM helps organizations identify and address security vulnerabilities across their application landscape, improving overall IT security posture.
Innovation Enablement: By streamlining the portfolio and focusing resources on valuable applications, organizations can free up resources for innovation and development of new applications that support strategic initiatives.
Key Considerations for Application Portfolio Management:
Application Rationalization: Regularly evaluating the applications in the portfolio to identify opportunities for consolidation, retirement, or modernization.
Standardization: Encouraging the use of standard platforms and technologies where possible to simplify management and reduce complexity.
Application Lifecycle Management: Implementing processes to manage the entire lifecycle of applications, from development and deployment to ongoing maintenance and support.
Business Alignment: Ensuring that applications in the portfolio are aligned with the organization's strategic goals and objectives.
In conclusion, the application portfolio is a fundamental concept in IT management. By effectively managing their application portfolio, organizations can optimize costs, improve efficiency, enhance security, and foster innovation. The application portfolio considers the integration and interoperability between different applications. It identifies dependencies and interfaces among applications, ensuring smooth data flow and seamless operation across the ecosystem.
The application portfolio is regularly reviewed and assessed to identify opportunities for rationalization and optimization. This involves analyzing duplicate or overlapping applications, evaluating their value, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness, and making informed decisions on consolidation, retirement, replacement, or modernization.
Applications
Business software that are designed and craved specifically to assist businesses in managing their daily processes, improving efficiency of work, and achieving their goals.
In most of the business cases, the Business software will store the data and process them using a database and support multiple user at the same time.
Data Objects
Data objects, also referred to as data structures or data entities, are the fundamental components used to represent and organize data within a software system. They provide ways to store and manipulate data in a structured manner, enabling efficient access of data, data retrieval, and data manipulation.
An example for the data object is a "Person" that describes the attributes of an individual like name, age, sex, height, weight, etc., In the context of an application portfolio, which primarily means association of these data objects, its applications, its Interfaces, that might be related/dependent on other applications.
Interfaces
An interface declares a list of method/signature (functions without implementations) and property declarations that a class must possess. It specifies what kind of operations can be performed on an object without specifying how those operations are implemented.
These interfaces may be consumed by other applications, customers and others to support their business processes without the need to recreate the data.
Development Stack
A software development stack, also referred to as a tech stack or technology stack, relates to a collection of software technologies and tools used simultaneously to build a software application.
It typically consists of different layers or components, each of which serves a specific purpose in the development scenarios.
These are very much essential to drive appropriate development standards and technology adaption, mitigate software risks, entitlements, and so on.
