Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
VAUGHAN: I'm going to take you through a short presentation and demonstration to introduce you
to Application Portfolio Management with Rational Focal Point.
I wanted to start off looking at some of the things that motivate an organization to invest
in putting and APM program together.
According to the analysts, somewhere between 60 to 80 percent of IT budget is going on enhancing
and maintaining existing applications and just keeping the lights on, and that's fine,
but the impact of that is that there's less money to spend on the strategic things
that will really differentiate you in the market and drive profitable growth There's also a lot
of complexity in many application portfolios.
It's built up over many years.
It gets worse through mergers and acquisitions and you get into a situation
where there's a disconnect between business strategy and all of the processes
and applications supporting that.
And that introduces a greater risk that IT isn't going to be able
to respond to changing business needs.
Thirdly, and this additional risk related to the amount of legacy in many application portfolios.
A lot of applications rely on older technologies that require specialists' skills to support
and there's a greater risk on many organizations that the people supporting
that when they are approaching retirement age are just going to disappear
from the organization or leave and find new work.
So how do we tackle those challenges, the challenge that we're spending a lot
of our IT budget just keeping the lights on, the challenge that we've got this rising complexity
in the application landscape and the challenge that there's greater risk
in supportability issues from the technologies underpinning the applications?
To quote Einstein, we can't solve those problems by using the same type of thinking
that we used when we created them.
In this context, whilst we can focus on the discretionary funds that we've got and look
at ways of improving maturity around how we select the initiatives
that will drive good investment decisions, not that many companies are using that same approach
to look at their existing business applications
which as we saw before are consuming the main part of the IT budget.
So the assertion here is that potentially companies have got this 80 20 rule wrong,
and if they do focus on their business applications,
then that offers the greatest drive for achieving cost savings
or facilitating strategic change.
Okay. So what is application portfolio management?
Well if you do a search on Google, you'll find that there are lots
of different definitions out there.
There's a lot of disagreement as to actually what a business application is.
For instance, is an Excel spreadsheet which is used by the business a business application?
And also it depends on whether you're approaching application portfolio management
from a top-down perspective where you're concerned about getting an inventory
and visibility of the applications that you've got and understanding the values
of those applications to different stakeholders, or whether you're approaching it
from a bottom-up perspective where you're looking at the detail of the quality
and the supportability of your applications going forward.
And for us, APM is about how we better align our IT spending
with the business strategy as it evolves and moves forward.
To do this what we need to have is an inventory of what we've got.
We need to understand who the business owners are who are responsible for those applications
and who within IT is their counterpart.
And then we need to understand what metrics we need to put in place in order
to support good investment decisions.
So for IBM, APM is very much a repeatable process that's used time and time again
and it's also all about using analytics and information in order
to drive investment decisions about what do we need to retire, and if we retain something,
do we just keep it as is or do we upgrade it, or if we replace something, do we go out
and lease it or rewrite it in-house?
And typically, that information lives in lots of different places, so we might have a CMDB,
for instance, which captures some basic information about the applications.
We might have an enterprise architecture repository
which has an architectural slant on our applications.
We might have a financial system like Cognos capturing the cost of ownership
of those applications, and there might be spreadsheets
and surveys capturing what our users think about the applications that they're using.
The key thing here is that when we do centralize just enough information
from those different places into one place, we can use that as a basis
for driving different IT optimization outcomes, so if we had a merger or an acquisition
and we've got a lot of duplication in our application portfolio,
consolidation might be a key driver in order to reduce the cost
of supporting duplicate capabilities.
If we're looking to improve agility, then modernization might be a focus area.
How do we focus our attention on the applications that are valuable
to the business that have IT risks and issues?
Or maybe we want to look at how we can better align our service level agreements
so that we are focusing our time and attention on those applications
that are really core to the business.
The point I want to get across here is that when you have that visibility and that transparency,
APM can drive a lot of different application optimization scenarios.
Okay. I'm going to take you through a short demonstration of Rational Focal Point
to show you how you can get started and how you can use the tuning
to support some of those things.
So the starting point for many organizations is that they've got some
of this information already in spreadsheets.
So what we can do is import those spreadsheets into Focal Point and the sort of information
that we would expect would be maybe a name and description of the application, if we're lucky,
who the business owner is and who the IT responsible person is.
And then we can add additional columns in order to understand who is the vendor,
or which portfolio do we want to segment the application into.
Now, the information I've got here includes a categorization
as to whether the application is legacy, whether it's tactical or strategic.
I've got a grouping around what portfolio it relates to, and then there is a figure
for the projected annual cost of those applications.
So when I've got this information in Focal Point I can begin to use some of the analysis tools
in order to focus where we need to investigate.
So in this example here I'm showing the balance of the portfolio according
to the different domains, so I can see here that the bulk
of my applications are in the risk control domain.
I can then add another perspective here to look at the categorization of those applications,
so here I can see that the bulk of the applications
in the risk control portfolio are the legacy applications and tactical applications,
so this could be a good hunting ground.
And then I can aggregate the total projected annual cost for all of those applications
in order to get some visibility of where the bulk of the cost is across the portfolio.
So once again, I can see that in the risk control portfolio it consumes the bulk
of the cost.
It's got the most legacy and tactical applications, so maybe this is an area
that I want to focus on for the first part of an assessment.
So we might move those applications to an assessment process
and what we can do here is start to capture some basic information through scorecards in order
to gain a view of the application value from a business and from an IT perspective.
So from the business perspective, how aligned is this application to power business strategy?
How critical is it to running the business?
What level of risks and issues are we seeing in the application?
And from an IT perspective, how aligned is it to our IT architectural strategy and what risks
and issues are we seeing from an architectural perspective?
By catching some basic detail about the applications,
we can begin to quantify the business and the IT score for those applications.
We can then leverage visualizations within the tooling in order to focus efforts
on investigating further those applications that might be warranting further effort.
What we can see here on the y-axis is that we've got a measure of the business value.
On the x-axis we've got a measure of the IT value and what this is telling us is that things
over here in the top right-hand corner are valued by the business.
They are valued by IT and we should be looking at some investing our resources
in how we can support and improve those going forward.
Over in the top left-hand corner we've got things that are valued by the business
that have some IT risks and issues associated with them, so how can we look
to modernize those going forward?
And then in the bottom left-hand quadrant, these are the applications
that are not as valued by the business.
They have IT risks and issues, so potentially these could be candidates
for what we could consolidate and what we could remove in order to drive costs
out of the application portfolio.
So all the way through this process we can drill down into this information in order to establish
that single source of truth around our application portfolio.
So the configurable form that we see here is split into sections.
We can see some additional measures that we have around the business value of the applications
in terms of the user base, the impact on outage...
...and we've got some other additional measures around the technical assessment in terms
of the staffing resource that we're supporting this application with as well
as some technical details around the application composition
and the supportability issues from an SLA perspective.
So when we go through this process, we can recommend dispositions,
some potential treatments for the application and we can also start
to add potential opportunities which would then transform our application portfolio
going forwards.
We can manage those opportunities directly in Focal Point and some of these are going
to be short and tactical opportunities.
Others are going to be longer-term strategic opportunities.
We can begin to capture some of the basic planning information that we need
in order to assess those opportunities.
So what applications is this opportunity going to impact?
And then how aligned is the opportunity to our architectural strategy?
And we can start to flesh out the business case, so the financial business case
for the opportunity and what the risks and the issues are around taking
that opportunity and going forward.
But looking at those opportunities, now some of those are going
to address more business risks and issues than others.
Some are going to be more simple and self-contained than others,
so let's have a look now at how Focal Point can help to establish the priorities
from a business perspective and from an IT perspective.
There are different techniques within Focal Points to help establish priority lists.
This approach works very well in a workshop environment
where we can get some business stakeholders into a room
and we can then use a pairwise analysis approach to establish the relative priorities
of those opportunities from the business users' perspectives.
So given a choice between this opportunity here on the left compared to this opportunity
to decommission low value applications on the right, which of those opportunities is going
to address the most business risks and issues for you?
We can capture stakeholder votes on this sliding scale down at the bottom here
so they can be both equal or maybe the stability issues
for the strategic issues is far more important than decommissioning the low value applications.
What this does provide is a good intuitive way of being able to uncover some
of the latent requirements and latent risks and issues around some of these things
that from an IT perspective we've discovered.
The end result of this process is that we can establish a rank ordered list
of the opportunities from the businesses perspective ranging
from the opportunity that's going to address the most risks and issues for them at the top
to the opportunity that's going to address the least risks and issues for them at the bottom.
If we do a similar process through with the IT stakeholders, we can begin to look
at where the trade-offs need to be made.
If we look at an opportunity here to investigate the continued business usage of applications,
there's a lot of business value in that,
but from an IT perspective is not a very simple and self-contained project.
So we can start the negotiation with business around those priorities and some
of the constraints we face in taking that forward.
Having established the priority lists, we can begin to put a bit more detail
around the potential duration of these projects and look at where the impacts are in terms
of the dependencies between these.
So here we can see that for each project we've got the start date, the end date,
and the benefits end date and the histogram at the bottom is showing the profile of the costs
and the benefits of these projects over time.
So what we can do when we're scheduling these initially is begin to move these around in
such a way that we get a cost and a benefits profile that is adapted to some
of the constraints that we've got.
And then all the way through this we can use dashboards and overviews within Focal Points
to help us keep up to speed with how our portfolio is progressing.
There are some example dashboards here, so they are split into sections,
so we've got an overview of how we can manage the portfolio in terms
of how we split the portfolio down into different domains, how we can define lifecycles
for the applications and how we can aggregate financial data across the portfolio.
We can manage by exception by flagging up, in this case applications
that consistently fail their service level agreements.
Through the assessment process we can define some of the high-level goals
to keep the commissioning plan, so each quarter how many applications do I want to retire?
How am I progressing against that?
When I go through the assessment process, how many applications am I marking
up to consolidate or to discontinue?
And for the assessment process itself, where are the blockages in the different stages
that the assessment process goes through?
We can support processes around how we target our investments
across the portfolio going forwards so this matrix here is showing how, on the x-axis,
how the projects are performing today, and the y-axis how they can be performing in the future.
And we can compartmentalize our projects into each of those categories and through scorecards,
and what this enables us to do is to bring together the top-down investment planning
around an investment change around different portfolios together with the bottom-up analysis
of how our projects are performing.
Okay. So the example I took you through is based around this set of templates
which are preconfigured and available within Focal Point.
They are adaptable to how you work and your methods and your roles,
but there is a starting point here which is based on IBM best practice.
So what you've seen in the demonstration is how we can quickly create a web-based inventory
of all of your business applications.
We've looked at some of the ways that we can use visualizations in Focal Points
to help focus attention on areas for improvement in the application estate.
We can integrate this with other processes and toolings such as enterprise architecture
in order to feed information around the impact of making changes in the application.
And then when it comes to identifying those opportunities for change,
we looked at one technique that helps us to establish both business and IT priorities,
and then how we can create roadmaps for change based
on those opportunity transformation initiatives.
So in summary, what the solution is doing is helping to promote a focus
on the strategic things that will drive profitable growth by helping to establish areas
for improvement from the application estate.
So it's about making better investment decisions by aligning those
with the organizational strategies.
It also provides improved efficiency in how you govern the rationalization efforts
and then how you can start to incrementally introduce this and adopt it into your process.
It also integrates with other Rational software capabilities
for the downstream application lifecycle management
and enterprise modernization activities.
I hope this was interesting and informative and I thank you for your attention.