The goal of the Application Portfolio Assessment (APA) is to evaluate an organization’s entire application portfolio to identify opportunities for optimization, cost savings, and performance improvements. Through this assessment, BTCaaS Consultants help organizations align their application portfolio with their business strategy, modernize legacy systems, and eliminate redundancies. Using advanced application rationalization tools, the assessment offers actionable insights into application efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and performance.
Phase 1: Discovery and Inventory
The first phase in the assessment process focuses on creating a comprehensive inventory of all the applications within the organization. This phase involves gathering key data and insights into the following aspects:
- Application Usage: Identifying active and redundant applications in the organization’s portfolio.
- Application Dependencies: Mapping relationships between applications, databases, and services to understand their interdependencies.
- Licensing and Maintenance Costs: Evaluating software licenses, support agreements, and maintenance costs for each application.
- Technology Stack: Understanding the underlying technologies (e.g., programming languages, databases, frameworks) that support the applications.
Tools Used:
- CAST Highlight provides software intelligence to assess application health and complexity. It identifies risks, technical debt, and opportunities for modernization. It also helps to determine which applications are candidates for cloud migration, refactoring, or retirement.
- iServer is an enterprise architecture tool that enables comprehensive application discovery and portfolio management. It helps in identifying application redundancies, evaluating criticality to business functions, and analyzing the applications’ strategic fit.
Phase 2: Application Categorization and Evaluation
Once the inventory is complete, the next phase is categorization and evaluation of each application in the portfolio based on various factors such as business value, technical health, and cost. This is crucial for rationalizing the application landscape and determining the optimal course of action for each application.
Key Categories for Evaluation:
- Business Value: Evaluate the importance of each application in supporting core business processes. Applications that drive revenue or play a crucial role in operations are considered high value.
- Technical Health: Assess the technical health of each application, including its maintainability, security, performance, and technical debt. Legacy applications with significant technical debt may require modernization or replacement.
- Cost: Assess the cost of maintaining and supporting each application, including licensing fees, infrastructure costs, and personnel resources. High-cost, low-value applications are prime candidates for rationalization.
- Redundancy: Identify duplicate or overlapping applications that serve similar business functions. Rationalizing these applications can lead to significant cost savings and efficiency improvements.
- Lifecycle Status: Classify applications based on their lifecycle: active, end-of-life, legacy, or planned for decommissioning.
Phase 3: Application Rationalization
After evaluating each application, the next phase involves application rationalization, where decisions are made about which applications to retain, retire, consolidate, or modernize. This step is essential for streamlining the application portfolio and optimizing performance, cost, and alignment with business objectives.
Rationalization Strategies:
- Retain: Applications that are strategic and provide high business value should be retained and potentially optimized to enhance performance and reduce costs.
- Retire: Legacy or redundant applications that no longer align with business goals should be retired to reduce overhead and streamline the IT landscape.
- Consolidate: Duplicate or similar applications can be consolidated into a single solution to eliminate redundancy and reduce costs.
- Modernize: Older applications that are critical but inefficient may be modernized by refactoring, migrating to the cloud, or integrating with modern platforms and technologies.
- Replace: In cases where the cost of modernization outweighs the benefits, certain applications may be replaced with off-the-shelf or cloud-based solutions.
Tools in Action:
- CAST Highlight provides insights into code-level complexity and maintainability, helping prioritize applications for modernization or replacement.
- iServer helps visualize the enterprise architecture, identify potential consolidation opportunities, and assess the business impact of retiring or replacing applications.
Phase 4: Cost-Saving and Performance Improvement Recommendations
Once the rationalization phase is complete, BTCaaS Consultants deliver a detailed Application Rationalization Report, which includes actionable recommendations for cost savings, performance improvements, and strategic alignment. This report helps businesses make informed decisions about their application portfolio and align IT investments with business goals.
Key Components of the Report:
- Cost-Saving Opportunities: Detailed analysis of potential cost savings from application consolidation, retirement, and license optimization. Recommendations for reducing infrastructure costs by retiring or modernizing legacy systems. Cloud migration opportunities that reduce on-premise infrastructure costs.
- Performance Improvement Recommendations: Identify applications that can benefit from optimization, such as upgrading or refactoring to improve performance, scalability, and security. Recommendations for cloud-native applications to enhance agility and enable faster deployment cycles.
- Application Health Scorecard: Each application receives a health score based on technical debt, maintainability, and alignment with business objectives. Recommendations for modernizing or refactoring low-scoring applications.
- Risk and Compliance Considerations: Identify applications that may pose security or compliance risks and recommend mitigation strategies. Evaluate the impact of application changes on regulatory compliance (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA).
- Future State Architecture: Provide a high-level architecture for the optimized application portfolio, showcasing the strategic alignment between business and IT. Recommendations for future-proofing the application portfolio by adopting agile, scalable, and cloud-native technologies.
Phase 5: High-Level Roadmap for Application Optimization
The final phase of the assessment involves creating a high-level roadmap that outlines the steps and timelines for optimizing the application portfolio. The roadmap includes:
- Prioritized Application Actions: A timeline for retaining, modernizing, consolidating, or retiring applications based on business and technical priorities.
- Migration and Modernization Plans: Detailed steps for migrating applications to cloud platforms (e.g., Azure, AWS) or refactoring them for better performance and scalability.
- Resource Allocation: Recommendations for resource allocation, including budget, personnel, and technology investments for the optimization process.
- Performance Metrics: Key performance indicators (KPIs) to track the success of the rationalization process, including cost savings, application performance improvements, and risk mitigation.
Conclusion
The BTCaaS Consultants’ Application Portfolio Assessment offers organizations a holistic view of their application landscape. By using industry-leading tools such as CAST Highlight and iServer, BTCaaS provides deep insights into application performance, costs, and strategic fit. The outcome of this assessment is a detailed Application Rationalization Report, highlighting cost-saving opportunities, performance improvements, and a clear roadmap for aligning IT investments with business goals.
Through this comprehensive assessment, organizations can reduce operational costs, enhance the performance of critical applications, and streamline their IT landscape for long-term efficiency and scalability. Ultimately, the Application Portfolio Assessment is a key enabler for digital transformation, helping businesses modernize their IT infrastructure and stay competitive in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.