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Beyond Portfolio Management
Beyond Portfolio Management
echnology has driven incredible gains in productivity in recent decades, but it has also exponentially increased the number of applications in almost every organization leaving many with thousands to manage. While Application Portfolio Management has helped them to clarify the costs of these applications and to understand their portfolios better, it does not effectively address all of the different complexities of application governance. For instance, how should they control the huge numbers of licenses and contracts they are now obligated to manage, or how should they deal with the complexities of forecasting and budgeting for these applications, or even how should they manage the various risk factors that applications bring to their portfolios? Companies have had difculties in coming to grips with these problems. Many companies have maintained a legacy silo structure tasked
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1. Application and License Management Description: Manages all tactical aspects of application demand management, license and contract management, and introduction and retirement of applications for lifecycle management
Processes: Demand Management License and Contract Management Lifecycle Management
2. Application Portfolio Management Description: Develop portfolio strategy, plan steps and processes for implementing that strategy and regularly review and optimize the portfolio
3. Financial Management
PORTOLIO MANAGEMENT
A&G right evaluation and scoring methods help management to understand the value, criticality, and overall risk of the applications in their portfolio.
Portfolio Planning: What are the various constraints and risks for implementing the planned portfolio optimization? Too often companies engaged in portfolio planning fail to realize that there are real constraints on their ability to change. Organizational concerns along with infrastructure, architecture and resource constraints will all affect the companys ability to implement the planned portfolio mix. This can be loosely understood as a PMO/governance function over the implementation of the optimized portfolio.
Description: Supports all aspects of forecasting and budgeting, managing costs and accounting, and allocating costs to the appropriate business users
4. Supporting Processes
Description: Supports the implementation and usage of the first three processes. Important for ensuring process transparency and understanding
Processes: Knowledge Management Operational Delivery and Support Management Communications Management Management Reporting and Control Architecture Strategy Risk Management
portfolio are no longer being used? For many application groups, effectively selling their applications is an important part of what they do.
License and Contract Management: What are the terms of the
contract for this application? Does it meet our needs in terms of costs and ability to distribute licenses efciently in the origination? Many applications can be almost impossible to manage across a global implementation. How many licenses are in use, and are we in compliance with the terms of our agreement? Are we at risk due to a particular contract and its compliance issues?
Lifecycle Management: How to we start and manage the projects to bring new applications into the portfolio and retire ones that are leaving? This is tied in closely with the Application Portfolio Management processes and is the tactical side of implementing the decisions made in that area.
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Application Portfolio Management Application Portfolio Management encompasses the strategic side of Application management and determines the appropriate mix of applications in the portfolio. It is highly dependent on the strategic business drivers for the corporation and includes:
Portfolio Strategy Development:
Financial Management The third primary process area is Financial Management. The areas here are:
Budgeting and Forecasting: Too many companies dont have the information needed to effectively forecast and budget their application spending. Without an effective budgeting and forecasting process the benets of portfolio management can be nullied due to inaccurate estimates or due to the inability to plan for and have sufcient time to evaluate an applications portfolio position prior to license renewals.
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What are the key drivers for the company and what is the right priority on those drivers? This area attempts to understand the real needs of the organization, and our experience has shown that must be driven by strong input from the business side of the organization.
Portfolio Optimization: What is the right mix of applications to support those goals? Which of the applications in the portfolio should eventually be retired? Which new applications should be added? The
ALAN HOUGHTON is a principal consultant at PA Consulting Group, specializing in IT strategy and systems development and integration. CHRIS NUTTALL is a managing consultant at PA Consulting Group, specializing in IT strategy, sourcing, and service management.
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PORTOLIO MANAGEMENT
A&G
ing application spend against budget is a traditional need. Any technology solution that is implemented should have the capability of matching vendor invoices to budget and should be effectively integrated with the companys nancial software (e.g., SAP, etc)
Allocations Management: Proper allocation of application spending provides the business with transparency into their real cost structure and in many cases can be implemented in a way that inuences positive behaviors and moderates demand.
Supporting Processes The fourth process area contains the supporting processes that tie together other process areas. They include: Knowledge Management, Com-
munications Management, Management Reporting, Architecture Strategy, Risk Management, and Operational Delivery and Support Management. These areas may be managed by the overall Application Governance Process, but also may be managed by other groups. While they may not be the rst things thought of for application governance, they are critical to success. While every company fulls these functions to some extent (and in many cases fullling them very well), few take a holistic look at this process as an integrated framework or understand which of these functions are weaknesses in their organization. Understanding how effective a company is at each of the process areas in the framework is a key building block for implementing an effective application governance framework. Experience shows that a short diagnostic of a companys application governance processes ver-
sus our process framework quickly identies the organizations strengths and weaknesses and develops a solid basis for improvement. In some cases, simple process changes can add signicant value and decrease a companys risk, but in many cases, greater benets can only be produced through the implementation of portal-type functionality that effectively integrates and shares information across all of these processes. Experience and skill are necessary to determine where an organization should start to implement an application governance framework tailored to their own particular needs. One thing is certain, though, as technology continues to drive productivity, comprehensive application governance will become an even more essential step for companies wishing to manage their risks and costs while continuing to gain strategic value from their portfolios. A&G