Your business operations are built on sophisticated application portfolios. These applications are ‘mission critical’ and cannot be allowed to fail. As a result, it is imperative that these systems conform to your standards for quality, stability, and efficiency. Neglecting to govern your development activities can expose your organization to unacceptable risks for business outages or similar disruptions.

At the same time, there are other external pressures on your application portfolio. Government regulations have become increasingly demanding. They compel you to adapt your business processes and prove that your systems adhere to requirements for privacy, security, and general behaviors. In this case, neglecting to govern your development activities can lead to significant legal exposure.

This means that it is important to govern your application portfolio throughout its lifecycle – from building applications through their modernization. Let’s look at several examples of how effective governance can help you to address business risks:

• Building Applications: As you maintain existing applications, or add new applications to the portfolio, it is important that they are well developed to avoid rework and outages. Effective governance involves analyzing your applications to determine how changes will impact the rest of the application portfolio. Further, by providing advanced development tooling, professionals can be more productive and greatly reduce the introduction of errors.
• Testing Applications: Analyzing applications to determine where to test can help to drive risks out of an application. But there are other aspects of risk that should be addressed during testing. For privacy concerns, it is imperative that customer data is never improperly exposed. Yet, for proper testing, you may require ‘live’ data. By obfuscating customer data you can address both issues and minimize risk.
• Managing Applications: Your organization will have different tolerances for different kinds of risks. As a result, it is important to define your key risk metrics and apply them to your application portfolio. By measuring your applications in business terms, you can spot misalignments and risk points and address them proactively through IT activities. This is especially powerful when executed within a recognized application management framework, like ITIL.
• Auditing Business Processes: For many kinds of regulatory compliance, it is necessary for IT to prove that their business processes conform to government mandates. But when business logic is buried deep within application code, how can you prove that you are compliant? Effective governance would respond by providing auditors with visibility into the business rules and processes embedded in their applications.
• Multiplying Expertise: Your applications are often very complex. This can lead to an overreliance on a small number of subject matter experts. This can be a substantial risk, as these experts can be inaccessible due to time constraints or movement to another role. By transferring knowledge about your applications between team members, a significant business risk can be removed. Also, through emulation technologies, you give authorized team members well-controlled access to proven business processes – further eliminating a troublesome bottleneck.
• Modernizing Applications: As you look to boost the efficiency and flexibility of your core applications, you will discover the advantages of modernizing existing systems. It is important to select modernization alternatives that return value quickly and cause virtually no disruption to your established business processes.

At Micro Focus Live, you’ll learn more about how effective governance of your application portfolio can boost business continuity and minimize risk.