IT APPLICATION PORTFOLIO MANAGER

SOFTWARE AND PROCESSES TO GAIN CONTROL OF
YOUR APPLICATION LANDSCAPE

What is your challenge as you see it?

“As a Director of IT Applications for a large financial institution, my challenges are to change tires while the vehicle is moving: how to keep running humongous legacy applications that control our trading floor, as well as attempting to migrate from old technology. Migration or legacy decommissioning is also triggered due to changes in the way we do business. People tend to think applications are isolated from projects, applications are isolated from architecture and applications are isolated from infrastructure and manage them individually. Migrating from old technology involves understanding business logic written in age-old apps, the interdependencies among applications, architecture and spend in different areas, not including the people component and the cost breakdown for each application. Again, Do I have the inventory of applications? Yes. Do I know anything more about them? No. ”

What solutions do you have today?

”Today, we have a few spreadsheets for packaged applications as well al long-lived homegrown applications. There are spreadsheets from a cost/license perspective, spreadsheets from a people and cost center perspective, and spreadsheets that drive the architecture and the patches riding on each server of the application. When something breaks we have another list of the contacts that we need to make, and the calls made and the fixes that are done to that application. This is manual-excessive and we do not get a holistic view across applications.”

What exactly do you need and why is it different?

You need a framework for managing across applications – and rationalizing spend, architecture, business processes and strategic relevance on one hand. You need the framework to maintain the dependencies among applications, dependencies on infrastructure and also the stakeholders involved when changes are made to the application, its base software or the hardware. You need the framework to also maintain the vendor commitments and cost center commitments in terms of spend. On top of it all, you need a powerful portfolio analyzer that allows you to assess the impacts and inter-relationships of spend, architecture, business relevance and the legacy, so that you can make decisions on decommissioning, consolidation and migration to new technology all in a timely and effective manner.

What does GRIP Application Portfolio Manager do? (What are its features?)

GRIP-IT Application Portfolio Manager is an interconnected set of modules that work on the inventory of applications as the core, while keeping all ties with enhancement projects and configuration changes that happen to every application. GRIP-IT Application Portfolio Manager also keeps the dependencies and interrelationships with other applications, architecture and spending changes. GRIP-IT Application Manager sees the rationalization and maintenance of applications as part of the extended lifecycle of IT delivery. Hence GRIP-IT Application Portfolio Manager comes integrated with portal, planning and timesheet tracking systems, linkages to IT Architecture Management, Cost center, Finance Manager and Resource Manager components. Above all, GRIP-IT Application Portfolio Manager embeds GRIP Portfolio Analyzer and Metrics modules, to introduce clarity and visibility for decision making purposes.

Part of the Bigger Picture…

GRIP-IT Application Portfolio Manager is part of the overarching GRIP management framework.