Nowadays, practitioners increasingly struggle with the complexity of application portfolios and thus increased operations costs and further efforts to fulfill upcoming business requirements in budget and time. Main issues of application portfolios in today's organization are
- huge amount (over 1.000) of porductive business applications
- missing transparency about porductive business applications
- functional overlaps in application landscape and
- technical issues in terms of standardization and heterogenity.
These problems lead to
- decreasing agility in IT projects
- high amount of efforts to solve incident tickets and further issues and
- unnecessary efforts in terms im operations and maintenance costs.
A series of expert interviews with 12 application owners to reveal root causes for application and application portfolio complexity underpinned the variety of this issue, illustrated in Figure 1.
Intention
- Define the term of complexity in case of application portfolios
- Further analysis of root causes that lead to such a complexity
- Development of best practices and methodologies to measure complexity dimensions of business applications and capabilities
- Derive clear actions to decrease application portfolio complexity, based on the complexity measurements