Why Your Enterprise App Portfolio Strategy Needs a Reality Check
Expert advice on how to get real about managing your enterprise application portfolio.
After all that's happened during the past two years, it'd sure be nice to go through one of those periods with lots of predictable, sustained business growth—when the Dow is always going up, this quarter is better than the last, and budget requests are approved without hesitation.
Print
The reality today is much different: Not much inside businesses moves in a linear fashion. And even when trying to "expect the unexpected," it seems that your CEO will announce a surprise merger ("Make our systems work with theirs"); or a supply-chain partner will go under ("Well, get us another one and sync up with the new one's procurement data"); or one industry's bad bets will crash the global economy ("Let's talk about 'bare bones' IT").
For IT, then, there has to be a more strategic and practical way to think about enterprise application portfolio management, since those apps that power various business lines will rarely move at the same pace. And it's high time to start waving the white flag, because most integration and middleware technologies have proven no match for geographic, vendor-specific and architectural boundaries.
In other words, it's a fool's errand to expect and command an entire application portfolio to act the same way, to move on similar timelines, to rely on architectural commonalities. The complex computing systems running today's businesses have become as malleable as a granite slab.
That's the thrust of a smart blog post by Dennis Gaughan, a managing VP within Gartner's enterprise software research team: Is It Time to Rethink Your Enterprise Application Portfolio Strategy?
First up, Gaughan writes, companies must realize that all apps should not be created equal:
Too many organizations have built their application strategies on a flawed premise: having a single, integrated application portfolio that's managed against a common set of criteria and evolves on a common timeline. But this has led to the mess many companies are in. Any changes to systems require a tremendous amount of effort because even simple modifications have far-reaching implications to foundational systems.
After brainstorming with his fellow Gartner team members, Gaughan says that they identified a three-tiered system to classify corporate applications based on the role they play. The goal is "to help develop a level of abstraction that can accelerate the pace of change for IT," he adds. The three:
- Systems of Record. Think of these as your foundational, critical apps that run your business. "They're transaction oriented and are core to financial reporting and regulatory compliance," Gaughan writes. "Their pace of change is slow, with their life span measured in decades. They're most likely delivered on premises."
- Systems of Differentiation. These give you a leg up on competition. "They connect to customers and trading partners, as well as help speed time to market and overall agility," he writes. "They're more collaborative in nature, and while they leverage data from systems of record, they capture and maintain additional information. They're relatively stable and have a life span of anywhere from three to 10 years. Many of these systems will be deployed on premises, but some may be delivered as a cloud application."
Previous Post: Oracle: Don't Hate the Player, Hate the GameNext Post: Your July 4 Fireworks: Made in China, Like Everything Else
What is Tech Briefcase?
TechBriefcase is a new, free service where IT Professionals can Search, Store and Share IT white papers and content like this. Learn more
Bookmark content
Speed up your research efforts with content across the web.
Search and Store
Find the white papers you need. Create folders for any topic.
View Anywhere
Open your briefcase on your iPhone, tablet or desktop. Share with colleagues.
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
