Gartner on APM Best Practices

An excellent piece of research came out from Gartner this week. Jim Duggan’s research details methods to make Application Portfolio Management successful. A key aspect of the research centers around the need to manage from diverse perspectives. That is, to manage the application portfolio based on contexts that matter to the business. A post on our Application Portfolio Management sister site goes into greater detail.

Let’s outline why Application Portfolio Management is so important. IT has no shortage of priorities. But are they the right priorities? Are investments being made in the right way to support the needs of the business? It’s hard to select and justify projects unless you can validate that they support corporate priorities. And with the trend toward cost containment this is becoming a more important issue. In the same line, IT must be investigating where cost savings can be achieved by rationalizing systems that can be eliminated.

That is where Application Portfolio Management comes in. It is a process of measuring the value, cost, and risk of the application portfolio from perspectives that are important to the business. For instance, what is the cost of applications that automate a given business process – versus its value to the organization. Or, what is the software quality trend for our outsourcing partners.

There are two keys here. First, we are collecting metrics from diverse sources. It could be stakeholder surveys, code metrics (like function points or cyclomatic complexity), or cost data from an ERP system. The point is to collect the kind of measurements that will aid the decision making process. Second, we want to place our collected metrics into the right business context. That is, we want to collect and group the metrics such that they are organized by business concept. This allows us to make IT decisions in the context of the business goals that we are supposed to manage to.