Four Reasons You Need to Implement a Robust Application Rationalization Program

Government agencies need more visibility into their application environment to understand and reduce their business risks and improve enterprise performance.

However, it’s often difficult for agencies to execute an effective application rationalization program for a variety of reasons, whether it’s because of manual application inventory management processes, competing business priorities or resistance to change within their organizations.

Even with these barriers, creating a robust application rationalization program is now a necessity for government organizations — the General Services Administration, FedRAMP, and the Department of Defense all have signaled as much by issuing their own application rationalization playbooks.

Here are four reasons why your organization needs to implement a robust application rationalization program now.

Reason #1: Application Rationalization Elevates Enterprise Performance

Application rationalization helps to improve the reliability, predictability and performance of the enterprise.

It gives your organization a clear line of sight into what applications are in your ecosystem, what purpose they serve and how to prioritize them. This also improves decision-making within your organization because you can make informed decisions about what software to patch, what solutions to retire and how to deliver services more cost-effectively to meet your mission.

With an effective application rationalization program, you empower every level of the enterprise to understand their impact every day.

Reason #2: Application Rationalization is Now Easier Thanks to Advanced Technologies

Some organizations maintain their application inventory in multiple Excel spreadsheets. Even though this information may be accurate, it doesn’t help organizations create a repeatable, automated or streamlined process for understanding their application environment.

Fortunately, modern IT portfolio management and planning solutions have emerged to help agencies address these challenges. These tools offer a range of application rationalization capabilities, including AI-driven, real-time, cross-portfolio analytics; insights into application interdependencies; features that drive better cost visibility and cost management; road mapping capabilities for collaborative planning, and integrated workflows that align with your data governance policies and existing business processes.

With a comprehensive IT portfolio management and planning tool, your agency can better understand the cost, risks, usage and business impact of a particular application and make the right technology investments that better align with your strategic goals.

Reason #3: You Can Truly Understand an Application’s Value to Your Enterprise

So much of what happens with traditional application rationalization is subjective. Someone says an application is valuable, but you can’t identify the product owner who can provide the best information or the product owner is claiming the application is already retired, but yet you find instances of it on a server or a client.

All of these circumstances make it more difficult to understand the true value of a particular solution to your enterprise. With a modern, technology-enabled application rationalization program that integrates robust analytics and a composite business value score for each application, you can move from subjective to fact-based scoring to understand the value an application actually provides. Your organization then can answer critical business questions such as how many users the application supports, which processes it supports, the true costs of running the application and what outcomes it delivers.

Reason #4: You Can Have a More Informed Conversation Across Your Organization

With so many competing business priorities, business users and IT teams sometimes operate from different playbooks.

However, your organization likely has one overarching mission, and there needs to be more alignment across the enterprise to achieve this goal. A robust application rationalization program allows your organization to develop a rational conversation about what is happening in the enterprise. Teams have the highest quality data and information at their fingertips to engage in the right business conversations and can work more collaboratively to identify and resolve business risks and enhance enterprise performance.

Advancing Your Application Rationalization Program

An effective application rationalize program allows you to answer complex business questions and develop a robust IT transformation strategy.

Too often, organizations treat application rationalization as a standalone IT project, rather than an ongoing enterprise-wide conversation. However, with modern tools and technology, your organization can gain more visibility into your application environment, access the data and insights you need to better understand your IT ecosystem, and improve service delivery across the enterprise.

Need to improve your application rationalization program? Learn how Alfabet, our IT portfolio management solution, can help here.