Application Portfolio Management
Inventory, ownership, cost and health for every application.
5 to work through
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intermediate
A fast-growing company has dozens of internal applications of unknown value. How should the portfolio be assessed, and what decisions should follow?
2 min answer -
intermediate
An enterprise has an application portfolio of several hundred systems and cannot decide what to retire. What analysis makes the decision tractable?
2 min answer -
intermediate
You inherit 300 applications and are asked which to retire first. Estimate what a single low-traffic internal application costs the organisation per year, and say which part of that number should drive the retirement order.
2 min answer -
advanced
A retirement programme will switch off 23 of 140 applications this year. Eleven of them sit on an Oracle Database Enterprise Edition estate licensed by the Processor metric - 4 servers of 32 physical Intel cores each. The business case claims the retirements save 11/140 of the database licence and support cost. Estimate what is actually saved in year one and say which number should drive the retirement order.
3 min answer -
advanced
An estate has 300 applications and the organisation cannot support them all. How do you decide what to retire?
2 min answer
3 terms in this topic
Application Portfolio Management
Managing the set of applications as an investment portfolio — deciding what to invest in, maintain, contain and retire.
practicePace-Layered Application Strategy
Sorting applications by how fast the business needs them to change - records slowly, differentiators quarterly, innovations weekly - and giving each …
practicePortfolio Assessment Matrix
Plotting each application on business value against technical quality, producing a disposition for every system in the estate.
2 artifacts you would hand over
Application Landscape Diagram
Every application in the estate placed against the business areas it serves, so duplication and orphans become visible.
Analysis ArtifactApplication Portfolio Heat Map
Every application placed on business value against technical health, so that invest, tolerate, migrate and eliminate become positions rather than opinions.
Neighbouring topics
Enterprise Architecture
General material on architecture at portfolio and estate scale.
EA Domains
Business, application, data and technology architecture as viewpoints.
Application Architecture
The application estate as a designed portfolio rather than an accumulation.
Technology Architecture
Platforms, runtimes and infrastructure standards across the estate.
Capability Maps in EA
The stable frame for hanging investment, ownership and health off.
Application Rationalisation
Retire, consolidate, replatform — and why retirement is under-applied.
Technology Standards
Guidance that teams follow because it helps, not because it is mandated.
Technology Radar
Adopt, trial, assess and hold — with movement, dates and owners.
Reference Architectures
Pre-approved templates for recurring solution shapes.
Architecture Governance
Preventive, automated controls rather than review meetings.
Architecture Review Boards
Thresholds, early engagement and a real route to accept deviation.
Enterprise Integration
Estate-wide integration strategy, standards and shared infrastructure.
TOGAF
The ADM as a checklist, tailored rather than followed literally.
EA Frameworks
Zachman, FEAF and others — vocabulary rather than method.
Architecture Roadmaps
Sequencing change across an estate with dependencies and funding.
Paved Roads
Making the supported path the easiest path, with a way to leave it.
Platform Teams
Reducing other teams' cognitive load, measured by adoption.
InnerSource
Open-source collaboration practices applied inside an organisation.
EA Metrics
Measuring whether architecture work changed anything.