Requirements Management & Business Process Improvement Blog

Application portfolio rationalization is an important and continuous exercise for evaluating and controlling IT costs. Application portfolio rationalization involves focusing on the application portfolio looking for duplicate applications, one-off technologies, applications with few users, and applications with a high cost/user ratio. With a complete understanding of the current environment, the next step is to consider what should be done to move from current to the ideal.

Industry analyst Gartner Group confirms that a focused application rationalization effort will typically result in substantial cost savings while improving support for the lines of business. These savings are too large to ignore. Additional benefits include a simplified infrastructure and an availability of resources, allowing organizations to focus on what really matters. One of the most consistent discoveries that organizations find in the rationalization process is that they are at a competitive disadvantage. IT environments are considerably more complex than they thought and that their total cost of ownership is considerably higher than many of their peers.

The questions below will help you assess your situation.

• How can you minimize incidents and reduce change requests?
• How do you ensure that you are focused on core business functions, such as finance, supply chain, marketing, etc.?
• What core technologies are essential to reaching your desired state?
• What applications do you require to run and support the business?

After strategic changes to the application portfolio have been identified, organizations must plan how to move forward to achieve these benefits. This takes defining and prioritizing projects and defining a clear set of requirements for each project.

The Enfocus Requirement Suite™ from Enfocus Solutions Inc. is a powerful tool, knowledgebase and framework that can be used to help with application portfolio rationalization. Applications may be defined in a product portfolio and evaluated for areas of improvement. Organizations can identify key stakeholders and make decisions to determine which applications should be retired, combined, or enhanced to deliver more value to the business. Projects may be defined with specific business objectives and accountable stakeholders to make the necessary changes to the application portfolio. The needed changes can be defined as project scope statements and detailed requirements can be defined for each scope statement to ensure that the application support teams clearly understand what needs to be done to achieve the cost savings and improvements in delivering more business value. To find out more, please download our product fact sheet.