IT organizations have long lacked real insight into the costs and resources needed to maintain applications, the very work that consumes the biggest chunk of their time. Year after year, IT leaders base their assumptions of budget requirements for mandatory and discretionary maintenance projects on the previous year's spending. But the piecemeal nature of maintenance work means they have little understanding of exactly how that money was spent, and whether the outlay was justified in each case.
Visibility is obscured by the common practice of maintaining applications as open projects, whose value is assumed rather than analyzed. As a result, resources continue to pour into maintaining everything from duplicate systems to products that are no longer in use throughout the organization. Inevitably, that has repercussions on an IT group's ability to reduce costs and redirect spending into more strategic projects.
CIOs have had few options to help them manage application portfolios separate from their project portfolios, and track IT-specific metrics for maintenance projects. Innotas is the first on-demand portfolio management vendor to offer Application Portfolio Management, which changes the game with:
- Resource and budget tracking associated with each application
- Default tracking of IT-specific metrics including date of service launch, vendor data, renewal dates, and application owners within IT and the business
- Flexible, unlimited hierarchical portfolios, including user-defined portfolio criteria combines important summary information with details from included projects and automated roll-ups of budget, estimates, and actuals to all levels.
360-Degree View of IT's Work
As CIOs have gotten a better handle on project portfolio management, they're eager to unlock the "black box" of application maintenance. They understand the huge amount of value that can be attained by getting their arms around the work that consumes such a huge amount of their time and budgets.
With hierarchical portfolio capabilities, CIOs can slice and dice their application work in myriad ways. They can attain dashboard-level views of application portfolio data, as it relates to factors such as line of business, geography, or any other user-defined criteria.
Combined with Project Portfolio Management, IT leadership now will be able to have a 100% understanding of all the work underway-and make better decisions about which investments to continue, kill, or upgrade in their quest to help the business drive more revenue.
Unlock the black box.
