From Troux Blog
Businesses need a road map to find their way through today’s chaotic business and technical changes to succeed in the “age of the customer.” The best road map is a “strategic” application portfolio management (APM) program, led by the CIO and enabled by enterprise architects.
That was the message of a recent Webinar, From Chaos to Harmony: Putting Your IT Portfolios to Work, featuring Forrester analysts Bobby Cameron and Tim DeGennaro, Troux CMO Will Scott, and Bill Laberis, senior editorial director of CIO Magazine.
Enterprises are facing technical upheavals ranging from cloud computing and mobile devices to the “consumerization” of IT as users buy, and connect, their own devices to corporate resources. Businesses must also become more “nimble, flexible, global and smart” to anticipate, and respond to, changing demands more quickly than competitors in what Forrester calls the “age of the customer.”
However, many organizations still operate “silos” of inflexible technology that make it harder to detect, and respond to, these needs, said Cameron. A strategic APM effort can not only help reduce costs through portfolio rationalization, said DeGennaro, but provide greater long-term benefits with fewer risks than the typical, “tactical” one-time APM effort.
The tactical APM still practiced by most companies is driven by the need to reduce cost and complexity and requires months as well as a sudden spike in staffing, said DeGennaro. It also carries risks if the organization makes the wrong rationalization decisions, and can damage IT’s reputation if business users see that without the APM effort IT itself wouldn’t know how many applications the organization was running. Such a tactical effort also cannot recoup any of the money spent inefficiently in the past, and leads to a “dead end” because organizations can only cut so far, he said.
The more effective, “strategic” APM prevents inefficiencies (rather than correct them) and can have unlimited impact by preparing the organization for future demands. Because it is done proactively, it avoids sudden “jolts” in staffing, and carries no risk to IT because it “can prove it has enabled and helped the business,” said DeGennaro.
To execute such an effort, IT must be able to capture the current state of the application portfolio, such as what technologies it owns, how much they cost, and their connections to capabilities, processes, and technologies. It also must be able to envision the “future state” – where is the company (and its customers) going, how is its technology changing, and how must the portfolio change to meet future demands (both of which are areas where EA fits perfectly). The next step is execution: Defining the roadmap, applying governance, standards and processes, and tracking progress and adjusting the strategy as needed.
DeGennaro also said that CIO involvement is crucial to making strategic APM work. While many on the EA team have the skills and desire to operate at a strategic level, the CIO must provide the IT vision, use his or her C-level status to connect EA to new stakeholders, free EA staff from tactical/project work, and link APM with the management of other functions such as business processes and business services.
The results of such a well-led, EA-enabled APM initiative is improved IT planning and efficiency that helps the organization anticipate and respond to customer needs. Organizations see the benefits in improved application management and planning of application life cycles; closer alignment of projects, application, service and technology choices to strategic needs, the creation of strategy-driven technology road maps, and closer connections between applications and the organization’s process and technology strategy.
To learn more about the age of the customer and the path from IT chaos to harmony, watch the Webinar.
