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=Evolution of the practice= It is unclear where the basic idea of managing IT application assets as though they were a financial portfolio first emerged as a corporate practice. The roots of APM appear to have started in the late 1980s and through the 1990s as organizations began to address the threat of application failure when the date changed to the year 2000 (a threat that became known as Y2K). During this time, tens of thousands of IT organizations around the world developed a comprehensive list of their applications, with information about each application. In many organizations, the value of developing this list was challenged by business leaders concerned about the cost of addressing the Y2K risk. In some organizations, the notion of managing the portfolio was presented to the business people in charge of the Information Technology budget as a benefit of performing the work, above and beyond managing the risk of application failure. =Business Case for APM= According to Forrester Research, the typical IT organization expends 78% of its human and capital resources maintaining an ever growing inventory of applications and supporting infrastructure"Application Portfolio Management Tools," Forrester Research, link to research . It is not uncommon to find organizations that have multiple systems that perform the same function. Many reasons may exist for this duplication, including independent decisions, corporate mergers, and abortive attempts to adopt new tools. Regardless of the duplication, each application is separately maintained and periodically upgraded. With a large majority of expenses going to manage the existing IT applications, the practice of Application Portfolio Management attempts to reign in these costs by identifying duplication and redundancy. The business benefit would come, according to the proponents of APM, by removing this duplication and redundancy by retiring systems that were not necessary. =Portfolio= Taking ideas from investment portfolio management, practitioners of APM gather information about each of the applications in use in a business or organization, including the cost to build and maintain the application, the business value produced, the quality of the application, and the expected lifespan. Using this information, the portfolio manager is able to provide detailed reports on the performance of the IT infrastructure in relation to the cost to own and the business value delivered. =Definition of an Application= In the field of application portfolio management, the definition of an application is a critical component. Many service providers offer services specifically tailored to helping an organization create their own definition, due to the often contentious results that come from these definitions. The definition below comes from the IT organization within the Microsoft Corporation as presented by their Enterprise Architecture team.Definition of an Application, Inside Architecture Blog , Nick Malik Software Application-- An executable software component or tightly coupled set of executable software components (one or more), deployed together, that deliver some or all of a series of steps needed to create, update, manage, calculate or display information for a specific business purpose. In order to be counted, each component must not be a member of another application. Software Component - An executable set of computer instructions contained in a single deployment container in such a way that it cannot be broken apart further. Examples include a Dynamic Link Library, an ASP web page, and a command line EXE app. A zip file may contain zero or more software components because it is easy to break them down further (by unpacking the ZIP archive). Software Application and '''Software Component''' are technical terms used to describe a specific instance of the class of Application Software for the purposes of IT Portfolio Management . See Application Software for a definition for non-practitioners of IT Management or Enterprise Architecture. The art and practice of Software Application Portfolio Management requires a fairly detailed and specific definition of an application in order to create a catalog of existing applications that are installed in an organization. THE REQUIREMENTS OF A DEFINITION The definition of an application has the following needs in the context of Application Portfolio Management:
Many organizations will readdress the definition of an application within the context of their IT Portfolio Management and governance practices. For that reason, this definition should be considered as a working start. EXAMPLES Often the definition of an application can be a difficult thing to convey clearly. In any established IT organization, there may be subtle differences in the definition between different teams and even within one IT team. It helps to illustrate the definition by providing examples. The section below offers some examples of how to interpret this definition. There are examples both of things that are applications, things that are not applications, and things that are a composite of two or more applications. Inclusions By this definition, the following are applications:
Exclusions The following are not an application at all.
Composites The following are many applications.
=Links and References= LINKS TO PRODUCT VENDORS Serena Mariner Speedware Compuware Changepoint Microsoft Project Portfolio Server Relativity Technologies Application Portfolio Manager LINKS TO SERVICE PROVIDERS HCL Cognizant IBM UMT Fujitsu Infosys Wipro REFERENCES |
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