In our January leadership strategy blog we shared our top four opportunities to create leverage for real changes with limited investment. One of them was to create a good portfolio insight. In this blog we want to dig a little deeper in how you can create that insight and what it can bring to you.
Segment your portfolio
To direct your IT spending wisely you should segment your portfolio over two (main) angles:
- Business Value
- Technical Value
By doing this you get four quadrants that allow you to prioritize your portfolio in an objective and defensible manner. This will give you an ideal starting point for explaining the changes that need to be made in the way your application landscape is developed and maintained. As an added dimension you can use the size of the circle to indicate functional or technical size of the application or the number of users or maintenance staff to get a better feeling which application needs the most attention.
Segment your portfolio into four quadrants
When you have segmented your portfolio into four quadrants, these are the logical steps you can take:
- Applications in the upper right quadrant have a high business value and a high technical value. These applications are fit for purpose and deserve the budget and attention to keep them there.
- Applications in the upper left quadrant have a high business value, but a low technical value. Here you should focus on how to get these applications to a better technical health to make them really fit for purpose.
- Applications in the lower right quadrant are okay from a technical perspective, but have low business value. When you don’t want to rationalize them, try to keep the technical health in order with the lowest level of maintenance.
- Applications in the lower left quadrant have both a low business value and a low technical value. These are the ideal candidates to review for rationalization or a minimization of development and maintenance effort.
How to get the information you need
To analyze your portfolio, we use data on the business value and technical value of your portfolio. When business data is not available, we can do a survey campaign to assess the business value of your applications. Every application owner is asked to complete a short survey about the application, its usage and the importance to your company.
When technical data is not available, we select tooling for you that can analyze the technical value in your own environment which helps you to gain the insight in the technical value of your applications. This tooling is non-intrusive in the sense that the tool results don’t contain any direct insight in the software that you are using gain your competitive advantage.
Take a closer look
Especially in the yellow quadrants you might want to take a closer look at the technical value of your applications. The selected tooling gives you the opportunity to look at certain aspects that can guide you to take more detailed action. For instance:
- Agility
- Security
- Resilience
- Cloud readiness
- Open Source vulnerabilities
- Use of Personally Identifiable information (GDPR risks)
We can also help you take a closer look at the business value by segmenting applications into categories of similar functionalities to see if you have options to de-duplicate some business functionalities.
Within weeks we can give you the portfolio insight you need to make guided decisions on how to spend your budget most wisely to avoid unnecessary risk or to use your IT resources optimally to support the business.
Make better decisions, faster with IDC Metri’s data driven insights in our IT Intelligence portfolio.
