Portfolio assessment now more than ever

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Over the weekend, I was reading a white paper on application portfolio modernization. This is an area I have been working with for well over a decade. It was interesting to see that even though there are a number of alternative modernization strategies, the approach described in this paper mirrored my own experience.

With the desire by organization to become more flexible and cut their operating costs, the need to assess the current application portfolio is becoming more compelling. For most businesses, the entire environment was based on an assumption of scarcity (of storage, data, computing…) and many of those limitations no longer hold true, so an assessment of where and how new value can be generated is needed.

Modernizing and consolidating business-critical systems, that are essentially a legacy of their success, is a necessary part of conserving critical organizational intellectual property and allowing the organization to advantage of new technologies. Goals need to be set and an incremental approach that shows progress toward those goals is about the only way to perform this sort of task, providing clarity and transparency into the tough decisions that will be required.