The typical IT organization expends as much as 80% of its human and capital resources maintaining an ever growing inventory of applications and supporting infrastructure. Born of autonomous business-unit-level decision making and mergers and acquisitions, many IT organizations manage multiple ERP applications, knowledge management systems, and BI and reporting tools. All are maintained and periodically upgraded, leading to costly duplication and unnecessary complexity in IT operations. Left unchecked, the demands on the IT organization to simply maintain its existing inventory of applications threatens to consume the capacity to deliver new projects.
According to a recent study conducted by the BPM Forum:
"Among large companies with revenues above $500M, 78% of survey respondents say there are redundant, deficient or obsolete applications being maintained and supported. A large number estimate that the cost of supporting those redundant applications consumes more than 20% of the IT budget."
- © BPM Forum
Create visibilityMost governance and portfolio management processes focus entirely on the selection of new business applications and the projects required to deliver them. Most portfolio management processes focus entirely on the selection of new business applications and the projects required to deliver them. Serena Mariner extends the boundaries of the IT governance process to include the final products of IT — the deployed applications. By bringing to light the sheer number of applications in the current portfolio, IT organizations can begin to reduce duplication and complexity.
Mariner's Portfolio Analyzer captures key information
about each application in the portfolio.
Click to enlarge
The APM process
Effective APM begins with ranking or categorizing applications along a number of dimensions, including business unit alignment, application characteristics, lifecycle, usage, performance and technical/architectural compliance. This assessment provides the necessary data to support decisions to replace, retire or further invest in applications across the enterprise.
More advanced organizations will benefit from total lifecycle planning and management, where long-term implications of investment decisions are examined. Accountability for total costs, both direct and indirect, and benefit realization is maintained at an application level. This ensures an optimal portfolio of applications that minimizes ongoing support and maintenance costs and frees up resources for other important business objectives.
Key Features:
Top down portfolio analysis — without getting bogged down in project details, Mariner allows portfolio analysts to perform top down analysis to quickly identify opportunities to rationalize the application portfolio.
Capture labor costs — Mariner collects application project, enhancement and support costs, enabling you to understand and manage 100% of resource activity.
Financial planning — Total costs, risks and benefits for applications in the portfolio are summarized, allowing you to make “buy/hold/sell” decisions for current and future applications.
Key Benefits:
Reduce operations costs — Mariner helps IT organizations identify and eliminate redundant and obsolete applications, thereby reducing costs by as much as 20% for large organizations.
Increase resource capacity for new projects — By identifying the mix between project and non-project (“keep the lights on”) activities, Mariner helps IT shift resources to projects that drive incremental business value.
Manage Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) — By collecting costs and benefits across the application lifecycle, Mariner helps IT make decisions about application replacement, investment and retirement.
An Integrated Solution
To get a complete picture of the applications that IT delivers to the business, Application Portfolio Management requires integration of high level application information with more complete resource and financial metrics. That's why the Application Portfolio Management capabilities of Mariner are completely integrated with robust Portfolio Management, Resource Management and Financial Management functionality.
Solving the Challenges of APM with Serena Mariner »
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