This blog post was inspired by Kristen Caretta of Search CIO @kcaretta who is writing an article about an organization's issues with legacy systems and she is looking for analysts, consultants to weigh in. I started writing her a response and thought it would make a good post. I have been writing on the topic of value with some frequency lately, so understanding the value of our systems and applications is timely.
Kristen's article will likely take on numerous dimensions. I suspect many will be tactical and operational because there are countless challenges associated with operating, maintaining, enhancing, integrating and ultimately retiring legacy systems. I focus largely on the strategic aspect of the problem - which is the very infrequent practice of Application Portfolio Management.
Application Portfolio Management (APM) attempts to use the lessons of financial portfolio management to measure and justify the financial benefits of each application in comparison to the costs of the application's maintenance and operations. This is incredibly important because large organizations have hundreds and even thousands of applications. APM provides the information needed to:
- Rationalize and prioritize applications
- Identify strategic and most critical applications
- Reduce or eliminate system redundancy
- Understand the value of program and projects requesting to invest in existing applications
- Free application maintenance dollars for higher-value uses
Many companies don't understand the value of their systems and applications. For most, the only time they consider the criticality of their applications (and by definition, the value) is during their annual Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity Planning. What they should be doing is using this essential insight to make daily decisions about their systems i.e. considering a project/program request that wants to invest in a legacy system with low value. Application Portfolio Management provides the insight necessary to determine if investing in a given system is a good business decision.
In addition to ensuring we know the value of these systems when considering project and program requests, application portfolio management identifies the low-value systems we should target for retirement (especially considering they are likely consuming a disproportionate percentage of operations and maintenance costs due to their age).
Application Portfolio Management also helps to counter the contrary behaviors of some of our system metrics. When I worked in Computer Operations, we focused on our 99.99-whatever availability. That was the measure of our success. We did not care whether the application was used by 5000 people or 5! There were even times when we didn't even know who was using some of our systems so we unplugged the server and monitored the Call Desk - to see if anyone called!
So for me, the first step in dealing with the "issues of legacy systems" is to understand their value to the organization. Application Portfolio Management is a great governance process that enables us to do so.
Steve Romero, IT Governance Evangelist