Your application portfolio is a strategic business asset. After all, it automates and controls critical business processes on a daily basis. In fact, for many companies, their primary client interfaces are driven by sophisticated applications. We see this in the banking industry where customers conduct most of their banking via Internet banking and ATMs.

As a result, it is imperative that these applications are well-aligned with the core goals of the business. For a bank, it might be to ensure that the ATM systems are always available. For a manufacturer, it may be to ensure that its order fulfillment systems can be adapted quickly to add new products. And for an insurer it might be that the applications must be transparent so that auditors can validate compliance with government regulations.

Regardless of the goal, it is important that IT managers understand the overarching business goals of their applications. By tracking adherence to these goals, they can spot where resources need to be reallocated. For instance, if we see uptime falling for a key application, this may require urgent attention.

Further, by matching IT initiatives to business goals, managers can have more productive negotiations with line of business users. After all, most IT teams have more than a 1-year backlog of activities. They need to make sure that they are working on the right activities.
So how should we proceed? A three stage process will help:

1. Understand your metrics: IT may have its own metrics that it uses to track success like architectural quality of applications, or time to develop an application, or number of bugs in a given application. While these can be important measures, they are unlikely to have use for discussions with business users. Business people will be more concerned with topics like ‘availability of the customer management system’ or ‘flexibility of the order management system’. Discovering which metrics matter is imperative.
2. Applying the right context: Your application portfolio should not only be viewed as a technical entity, it should also be seen as a business asset. This means looking at the application portfolio through different prisms. For instance, which portions supports which business processes? Or, which portions are managed by which of your global development teams? By grouping elements in your application portfolio by business contexts that matter to you, you can ‘roll-up’ metrics into true key performance indicators.

3. Make a decision: When you can filter measurements into useful metrics, you can better guide decisions about your application portfolio. You can start to identify where your applications are moving away from supporting key corporate goals, and where you should focus your supply of development resources.
4. Act: Now that you have spotted misalignments, it’s time to act. As you have been collecting measurements about your application portfolio, you’ve been collecting rich insights into the structure and behavior of your applications. This is the information that your development team needs to make decisions that turn into development tasks and hence into better aligned application portfolios. Now, you can monitor these alignment measures on a continuous basis, correcting misalignments before they become business disruptions.
   

At Micro Focus Live, we’ll investigate how you can measure your application portfolios, and turn them from technical assets into well-aligned business assets.