Why does Application Portfolio Management feel so hard?*

Business process change, corporate acquisition, technology refresh, platform innovation, automation, and the drive to compete have, built layers of applications with the corporate IT estate over the past few decades.

There is an old Irish joke: when asked for directions, most people will tell you the best way to get to where you are going is to start from somewhere else. Application Portfolio Management feels hard because, if you had known where you would end up, you would have started from a different place.

Assessing Fit against Cost

Application managers are being squeezed on all sides to assess the value, fit and agility of applications against the cost, complexity and risk of change. Resource provisioning is often based on “the squeakiest wheel gets the grease” and “whatever falls behind stays behind.” Lack of common architecture and data currency has created a Gordian Knot, that is, an intractable problem of operational complexity that is strangling Large Enterprise.

How Can You Make it Easier?

Gartner Consulting now provides an objective way to rationalize the application portfolio through its TIME evaluation methodology to produce an articulate definition of which applications to Eliminate, Migrate, Tolerate or Invest. Within the dashboard, the operational significance and cost of each application is analyzed and weighted in a quadrant that describes the health and equilibrium of the application estate.

This process lets you visualize and calculate the scope.

What it does not do is remediate.

For that you need a tool like DataNovata to quickly generate compliant, business views of the application data on digital platform. After which you can decommission the Eliminate sector, shrink your data migration effort, shrink resources in the Tolerate sector and enable agile, scalable, continuous modernization in the Invest sector.

Like Alexander the Great, DataNovata cuts through the Gordian Knot to make data accessible through transformation. DataNovata is the only archiving tool recognized by Gartner Research as advancing technology in multiplatform modernization.

* This article is based on a Gartner presentation made by Bill Swanton of Gartner Research at the Application Strategies & Solutions Summit, Las Vegas, December 2019 entitled: “Fundamentals of Application Portfolio Management”. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

**TIME quadrant image courtesy of Gartner Research. © 2020 all rights reserved.