Your application portfolio is crucial: it represents, automates and controls the heart of company activity. But as your strategy and activity move forward, applications also evolve. The application portfolio becomes increasingly complex as new applications are created, existing applications evolve and new developments are added.
In parallel, IT department personnel who are familiar with the portfolio or who provide service for it might change jobs or leave the company, leaving a gap in application portfolio knowledge.
This is where IT4Control can help. IT4® includes the 4PPM® and 4APM® functions that give you the means to conserve information and information history together in a sole repository and then provide specific access to it. You will be able to tie together elements that were previously scattered in heterogeneous, compartmentalized silos, such as requests for upgrades or maintenance and their associated costs.
IT4® gives you the keys to resolve technical aspects, analyze the impact of version upgrades and evaluate business utilizations. You will be able to determine the value, risk and cost of IT for your company and thus be able to establish the levels – and budget – necessary for implementing maintenance and modernizing your system.
IT4Control brings an answer to the business, financial and technical questions of each key participant with a solution that is unified and integrated: IT4®
Your company’s activity is managed from different angles. The same is true of your IT portfolio. Business users want to know if functions will meet expectations, if there will be a gain in efficiency and productivity, if it will be easy to adapt business processes, etc. Those who are in charge of operating or possibly externalizing the applications want to facilitate application maintenance, prepare for the future and be assured that a potential supplier will meet service needs.
This means that Application Portfolio Management will be carried out in different ways and using different solutions, depending on the persons involved. IT4Control provides an answer for everyone with IT4®, a unified solution.
Know application structure
IT4® stores knowledge and conserves its history, thus reinforcing expertise. All information concerning organization of the application and its components can be indicated in the application file. In addition, this information can be completed by an analysis of third-party tools, such as those by Cast Software, and IT4Control partner, or other market solutions.
All this knowledge is paramount and leads to a savings in time and workload when a new team takes over or when solution maintenance is externalized.
Know application health
IT4® provides the possibility of identifying points of application malfunction at any level. To do this, the solution takes into account a broad range of information and summarizes it in a way that is concretely useful. This can be, for example, user opinions, help-desk or operational incidents or automatic measurement of application performance.
In contrast to many solutions that provide only a fragmented view, IT4® correlates information from numerous sources: operation, code, help desk, etc. Problems are thus rapidly identified and persons in charge are able to solve them rapidly according to priorities.
Know the relationship between applications and application mapping
IT4® describes the relations between applications and allows documenting them. This reduces time needed to identify impact, control risk and prepare related projects and budgets for upgrade study. These relations are visually represented through application mapping that lists the applications, their components, the links between them and the types of links.
Understand processes
Application managers can use IT4® and the 4APM® functions to identify applications and processes with low added value for business, redundant applications and dead ends, which are excellent candidates for externalization, replacement or rewriting. These upgrades and projects can be integrated in project portfolio management and tied to the application concerned in order to follow the upgrading process. In consequence, management is free to concentrate on business priorities and the tasks necessary to moving the application portfolio toward the target.
Applications have value because they support and automate business activity processes. IT4® provides solutions for localizing, documenting, organizing and improving the business logic sustained by the applications and the application portfolio and keeping it properly in line with company activity.