APM Software: The Real Benefit. Providing Functionality for Future State Architecture Design.
Feb 3, 2023
APM software is vital in today’s economic climate. CIOs are under continuous pressure to transform the IT landscape to respond to technologies disrupting existing business and operating models, regulatory requirements and other global drivers such as the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. IT portfolio managers and architects give them the insights they need to make investment decisions by implementing the application portfolio management discipline.
Application portfolio management isn’t a once-off project but a continuous process of assessing portfolios. This discipline evaluates portfolios against criteria necessary for the organization to decide how to transform the application landscape.
Organizations’ rationale for using applications portfolio management may differ depending on their situation. Scenarios may include that organizations look at cloud transformation of legacy applications or implement cloud-native (industry) platforms. These organizations may want to provide a more secure, resilient and efficient IT foundation to enable faster time-to-value or to address the United Nation’s Sustainable Developmental Goals, like reducing carbon emissions.
Following Mergers & Acquisitions, organizations usually face a landscape with functional redundancies with different degrees of complexity. This needs to be addressed to raise business and technical value and reduce risks and costs over time.
Cost optimization is another typical reason for implementing application portfolio management. Organizations may want to increase the shift from Capex to Opex and reduce spending on ‘commodity’ applications to reduce costs or to free up investments in business innovation. Innovation and modernization are required to improve security and digitize businesses, attract young talent and benefit from current and future innovations such as AI.
The rationale may also be as simple as organizations wanting to start or refresh their applications portfolio management discipline to get transparency and a single source of truth.
Regardless of your reasons for application portfolio management, the software you buy must meet different stakeholders’ needs – now and in the future. Most of the application portfolio management software on the market today helps you to establish an application inventory. Still, it includes limited functionality for multi-dimensional analysis and future state architecture designs and scenarios.
Future state enterprise architecture describes where the organization wants to be and provides a roadmap for the transformation. Designing future architecture is especially important to address an organization’s application portfolio management discipline effectively.
However, the reality today is that architects use different sources, such as ServiceNow and Microsoft® PowerPoint or Visio, to describe future state. When they make changes to the architectural designs in these sources, it doesn’t reflect in the applications’ repository of the applications portfolio management software, and vice-versa.
This leads to cluttered information in different tools resulting in double work of finding and synchronizing information on applications and changes for stakeholders involved in the landscape change. Especially at the project start, you could easily waste time harmonizing different drawings before starting on common ground.
It’s therefore important that when you investigate purchasing applications portfolio management software, it needs to provide functionality for future state architecture design. A transparent overview of your entire application landscape is essential, but you must also plan for the future.
The software you purchase needs to allow you to integrate with different data sources, assess the application landscape and design future state architecture to optimize decision-making based on facts. This must be done all in one platform with best practices architectural languages. It’s the only way to get full traceability from strategy to transformation design!
Designing future application transformations with Bizzdesign’s APM+ solution
READ: How to use ServiceNow APM and Bizzdesign to win at Digital Transformation
