Application portfolios automate the operations of every organization. In fact, business processes have become indistinguishable from the applications that execute them. So it is essential that your applications align with the business strategies and goals of the organization.

But for most large organizations this kind of flexibility can be more challenging. Applications have grown so technically complex that they cannot be adapted without significant cost and risk. To address this challenge requires business intelligence about your application portfolio.

For application development teams – including ISVs – understanding the structure and function of your applications can be a compelling competitive differentiator. For ISVs in particular it provides detailed technical documentation of your existing applications, information that your end-clients would consider invaluable for ongoing maintenance.

It is also extremely valuable for customers that have installed and modified your packages. By understanding their ‘bespoke’ applications, they are better prepared for upgrades or for integrating additional portions of your solution.

To provide this insight into your applications, Micro Focus offers the Modernization Workbench. The Modernization Workbench creates a centralized, always-current warehouse of business intelligence about the applications that run your business. These insights allow your team to identify and execute development activities more efficiently and with significantly less risk.
The Modernization Workbench collects and combines:

• Technical Insights: Unlike niche tools that provide simple scans of your enterprise applications, the Modernization Workbench offers a comprehensive approach. It generates detailed structural models of existing applications across diverse environments – from COBOL, PL/I, and Natural to PowerBuilder, Visual Basic, and Java. The platform richly parses source code, tracing complex relationships between programming entities.

• Business Insights: The platform allows users to understand their applications from a business perspective. Users can place multiple overlapping business descriptions onto artifacts, transactions, and other entities. For instance, users can ‘tag’ artifacts by the business process they execute or the geography that manages them. This allows users to analyze and manage their application portfolio in a business-centric way. Further, the Modernization Workbench offers patented business rule mining capabilities. This function allows analysts to locate, document, and organize the business logic embedded within their systems. Users can quickly relearn how their applications behave in support of core processes.

• External Sources of Intelligence: Intelligence from other sources can be important for executing development tasks. For instance, managers want to know where to focus programmers. Data about cost, opinions about application value, and bug counts can be imported into the platform. This provides rich intelligence that can help guide portfolio governance decisions.

The rich business intelligence is consolidated within an extensible, enterprise-class knowledgebase. Globally distributed users have access to the same source of information. This ensures that knowledge about core applications can be efficiently transferred between international teams, improving collaboration. In fact, the platform has proven its value at massive worldwide deployments.

Now that deep insight into your applications has been collected, how can it be used? There are numerous ways:

• Understand the Application Portfolio: Rising complexity and a loss of knowledge about your application portfolio means that few CIOs know their “current state”. By understanding the reality of your applications, you can better plan and execute development activities, and transition knowledge between global teams. Customer-led ROI studies have shown that the Modernization Workbench generates business intelligence 70% faster than manual approaches.

• Application Portfolio Management: The Modernization Workbench’s data feeds give users detailed insight into where misalignments exist between the business priorities and the software that runs their businesses. Managers can track and trend this data to govern which applications should be priorities for modernization activities and which should be returned to maintenance.

• Application Modernization: Regardless of which of the many paths to modernization that an organization takes, the Modernization Workbench speeds the initiative. For instance, the platform can isolate proven business logic into standalone components that can be independently called as services. You can also use the technology to renovate and re-architect your applications to radically reduce complexity and boost maintainability. You can also deploy other Micro Focus technologies to dramatically improve the quality and efficiency of your applications.

• Efficient Application Maintenance: The Modernization Workbench accelerates maintenance through rich analysis and documentation capabilities that improve the efficiency and responsiveness of maintenance teams. In fact, customer-led ROI studies have shown that large change requests are completed in as much as 50% less time than with alternative approaches.

In Micro Focus Live, you’ll have access to numerous ‘real world’ sessions that demonstrate how you can use this technology to understand and better manage your application portfolio.