Business Case For APM
According to Forrester Research, "For IT operating budgets, enterprises spend two-thirds or more on ongoing operations and maintenance.".
It is common to find organizations that have multiple systems that perform the same function. Many reasons may exist for this duplication, including the former prominence of departmental computing, the application silos of the 1970s and 1980s, the proliferation of corporate mergers and acquisitions, and abortive attempts to adopt new tools. Regardless of the duplication, each application is separately maintained and periodically upgraded, and the redundancy increases complexity and cost.
With a large majority of expenses going to manage the existing IT applications, the transparency of the current inventory of applications and resource consumption is a primary goal of Application Portfolio Management. This enables firms to: 1) identify and eliminate partially and wholly redundant applications, 2) quantify the condition of applications in terms of stability, quality, and maintainability, 3) quantify the business value / impact of applications and the relative importance of each application to the business, 4) allocate resources according to the applications' condition and importance in the context of business priorities.
Transparency also aids strategic planning efforts and diffuses business / IT conflict, because when business leaders understand how applications support their key business functions, and the impact of outages and poor quality, conversations turn away from blaming IT for excessive costs and toward how to best spend precious resources to support corporate priorities.
Read more about this topic: Application Portfolio Management
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