Application Portfolio Management Solution

Manage all IT asset inventory and characteristics

A question as simple as ‘what digital assets do we have’ should be easy to answer, but it isn’t.  Isolated islands of technology forgotten by formal management, shadow IT, poorly managed service-based technologies and the like have all resulted in assets that are poorly understood, and barely managed.  And in many cases the tracking of those assets, if it happens at all, is entrusted to spreadsheets.

APM requires a single, integrated repository of every asset, regardless of where it lives across the enterprise, along with key characteristics about those assets.  That information must include the technical aspects of versions, platforms, integrations and the like as well as business aspects like departments, supported capabilities, owners and so on.  That’s what 360 Enterprise Connect gives you, and unlike spreadsheets it integrates across the entire enterprise to allow you to leverage that inventory for better decisions, better investments, and better returns.

Effective, Efficient & Continuous Inventory Management

An asset inventory is a solid foundation, but if it’s only a snapshot then it doesn’t do an organization much good.  With the pace of change in today’s world it will be outdated before it’s even complete.  With UMT360, the inventory is integrated across the entire enterprise, allowing the maintenance of it to be automated.

That provides a number of key advantages.  Organizations are able to continuously manage and control changes to the inventory in an effective and efficient manner – there is confidence that inventory assets are complete, accurate and current without relying on significant amounts of manual intervention and effort.  The implication of that is that the organization has complete control over technology assets.

Nothing can be added to, removed from, or changed within the inventory of technology assets without IT leaders being aware.  Isolated and abandoned technologies are eliminated, impacts of decisions are understood and planned for, and finally organizations are controlling their technology rather than having their technology control them.

Portfolio Analysis and Rationalization

An IT asset inventory should do more than simply tell an organization what technologies they have.  UMT360 gives organizations powerful analysis tools that allow assessment of that portfolio of assets to reveal areas of redundancy, capability gaps, technical debt, misalignment with strategies and so on.  This provides the level of insight necessary to rationalize the portfolio, eliminating those assets that no longer belong.

Our 360 Enterprise Connect solution supports all popular analysis models (TIME, 6R, etc.) and allows organizations to tie the output of that analysis into their investment decisions, funding and delivery elements managed through our 360 Portfolio Insights product.  This creates a direct connection between portfolio analysis, funding, delivery and business outcomes, giving technology and business leaders the insight into how they are driving business success.

Technology and business roadmap synchronization

When an organization implements APM in the context of those business capabilities it drives practical improvements to the way business is planned and delivered.  Application portfolio management enables the creation of an application roadmap – the planned lifecycles of all digital assets over the coming periods, the dependencies between those assets, and so on.  Alignment with business capabilities also means alignment between that application roadmap and the strategic business roadmap of the organization.

This synchronization allows for seamless mutual support for each other – investments approved in the strategic roadmap drive enhancements and adjustments within the application roadmap; while evolution of the technologies managed through the application roadmap are enablers of business capabilities on the strategic roadmap.  Roadmapping tools offer a simple, intuitive way to plan and communicate those strategies to all stakeholders, it’s easy to keep everyone on the same page as to what’s happening, what’s planned, why adjustments are needed and how to implement them, etc.

Alignment with Business Capabilities

Organizations shouldn’t be analyzing and rationalizing their application portfolios in isolation.  Every element of APM has to support the current and planned business capabilities of the organization.  Today, organizations increasingly expect to view their enterprises in terms of those business capabilities and the value streams that deliver them.  It’s not enough to think, plan and operate only in terms of products and services.  That requires the ability to tie investments and assets to those capabilities.  In short, applications must not only support immediate tactical needs, they must enable strategic success.

360 Enterprise Connect provides a holistic view of the current and desired enterprise through Enterprise Architecture and delivers effective and efficient APM, allowing organizations to ensure that every asset portfolio is aligned with strategic priorities, as well as helping deliver the right solutions at the right time.

Effectively Initiating Change

Synchronization at the roadmap level then enables synchronization at the delivery level.  To succeed, APM must do more than understand how the application portfolio must evolve to support business capabilities, it must enable that change to occur.  The integration between UMT360’s 360 Enterprise Connect and 360 Portfolio Insights solutions allows the analysis within APM to feed the strategic planning, funding and delivery that combine into Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM).

This integration also extends to demand coming from the business – the technology changes required to support the strategic priorities of the enterprise.  Work delivered under an organization’s SPM approach will drive adjustments to application roadmaps, change the variables considered in portfolio analysis, and ensure that technology and business portfolios remain in alignment in today’s fast paced world.

Total Cost of Ownership

Digital assets represent a significant part of an organization’s expenditure.  In order to optimize strategic performance, it is essential that there is understanding of the costs of all technologies – not just the development or direct operating costs, but the total cost of ownership across their lifecycle.  The powerful financial management capabilities of our 360 Portfolio Insights solution, combined with seamless integration with finance platforms, provides that level of understanding, enabling better decisions around how, or if to continue investments in individual assets.

Integrations

Application portfolio management is a data driven discipline.  It relies on complete and accurate details of every asset, and what’s happening with each of those assets.  That means that organizations need to be able to integrate their APM tool with the sources of all that data.  360 Enterprise Connect delivers that integration allowing you to manage all technology types across cloud and on-premise solutions, to manage the impact of service management and ticketing solutions, to capture changes driven by work execution, and so on.

By eliminating the need for manually keying or rekeying data, the focus can be on optimizing your portfolio – in less time and more effectively.  That drives performance and builds confidence that the decisions being made are the best possible based on the enterprise’s current state.