Application Portfolio Management: An Overview

One of the challenges of introducing fancy terms is people will think that you are using a 25 cent word when a five cent word would do.

That was my initial concern when I brought the term Application Portfolio Management to my company. APM was a dream in November and December when I started with my current company so I just kept it on the shelf and hoped that one day we could get to it.

In March of this year, the daylight savings patch project hit. The first thing we had to do was work with the existing team to identify how many servers we had. We had no clue. The list of servers and locations created the first authoritative list of systems. We plowed through the DST project but a bigger accomplishment occurred. We now had a list of servers.

It would be easy to call the initiative “server consolidation” because technically we are reducing the number of servers we have. But server consolidation is a tactical, operations only focus on the real business problem that needs to be addressed. We don’t have a problem of too many servers, we have a problem of too many systems and applications that the business has asked us to support on their behalf.

APM forces IT to engage the business on agreeing to the right level of hosting necessary to support the business goals. APM looks not at servers and physical boxes rather it looks at the applications that run on them that are in service of some larger revenue or expense goal. If we are hosting an application, APM demands that the application have an owner in the business that has signed up for the value said application is delivering.

But the first step is to build a list. The second step is to pull together the list of systems and departments assigned to those devices. Once we have the business signed up for their servers, we can then help them rationalize the number of applications and systems it takes to run their business units.

Phase one of APM is gathering the list of devices and making the easy decisions regarding how many prod, dev, and stage servers we have and if any of them are candidates for decommissioning. For a small company that has grown rapidly, we have built a large list of candidates for decommissioning over the years.

The second phase is to gain finance support for allocating the cost back to each department. This is where we really gain traction on the APM initiative. We have real dollars that we are spending that can be saved through APM phase 2. Right now, IT eats that bill. The business is not incented to reduce the number of systems we have in our three environments. By presenting a hosting cost by business unit, it helps the company bring down its expenses by determining if systems and their applications are really worth the money we are spending to maintain them.

We’re on our way and with IT, Finance, and the business support, we’ll be able to lower our company’s operating expenses while improving IT’s responsiveness at the same time.