Focal Point™

Analysts estimate that 70-80% of IT operating budgets are being used to maintain existing applications. This means less money to spend on new strategic applications that can differentiate your organization in the marketplace. Additionally, the complexity of a mature application portfolio that's been built up over many years leads to reduced business agility, since it takes too long for updates to these applications to yield an effective response to emerging business needs.

As application portfolios propagate through mergers and acquisitions, a disconnect can form between business strategy and all of the processes and applications supporting it. As such, aging portfolios expose the company to many risks, including compliance risk, risk of losing people with critical application knowledge, and risk associated with using old technology.

Continuously assess applications with APM

Application Portfolio Management (APM) is the practice of assessing the applications that run your business in terms of their business value, enhancement potential, cost, and risk. However, in most organizations, information about the application inventory, the associated technology, financial performance, business value, technical debt, and service quality is contained in a myriad of spreadsheets and systems, in people’s heads and distributed across isolated organizations. This prevents meaningful comparison and analysis of this information to enable timely decision making.

UNICOM® Focal Point™ provides a web-based, repository-driven APM solution that addresses these challenges - enabling you to continuously assess applications through transparent and objective processes, helping teams make better and faster decisions by using information-gathering and analytics capabilities.

Application scorecard

UNICOM® Focal Point™ enables APM in a variety of usage scenarios:

• Consolidation – Many organizations start with a consolidation and simplification of their application portfolio, since this approach can provide a fast payback time while allowing savings to be reinvested in further optimizations of the portfolio
• Modernization – Most companies have huge mission-critical investments in existing applications and often find it difficult to capitalize on those investments because they do not know how to prioritize the modernization efforts. With Focal Point, you can prioritize your legacy assets to highlight those that could yield maximum returns with an enterprise modernization program. These capabilities enable companies to reduce hardware, licensing fees, maintenance costs, improve business agility, open up new business opportunities and reduce risk associated with aging skills and technology
• Investment management – Objectively and transparently align funds spent on application maintenance and renovation with organizational priorities
• SLA optimization – consolidate the number of service level agreements (SLAs) you use to simplify operations. While avoiding the assignment of high SLA levels to non-business-critical applications to reduce operational costs
• Compliance – Once an application inventory has been established, it is much easier to extend its use to manage regulatory and industry compliance
• Cloud – Decide what applications should be moved to the cloud by looking at factors such as seasonal fluctuations in load and technology alignment with the cloud operating environment. Understand which applications can be lift-and-shifted to the cloud, versus redesigned or recreated as cloud native based on application code assessments

Focal Point for APM

UNICOM® Focal Point™ APM features include:

• A robust, web-enabled solution for maintaining an application inventory, with rigorous security and change tracking capabilities
• Web-survey and role-based views helping stakeholders provide the application information that the system prompts them to collect
• Ability to automatically collect information from other information sources (using Microsoft Excel, CVS file format, SOAP and web-services interfaces)
• Workflows supporting the application gathering, assessment, and decision making process
• Analytics supporting score carding for rapid and objective decision making
• Collaborative decision support helping a team set priorities and evaluate options based on agreed-to priorities
• Support for project identification and definition, project road mapping based on resource and financial constraints and project selection based on desired selection criteria
• Financial analysis, including ability to do 'what-if' assessments for estimating return on investment (ROI) reflecting the inherent uncertainty in cost and benefit analysis of future transformation projects
  • Using the on-board Monte Carlo Simulator financial probability calculations can return 'what-if' scenarios for "Low", "Likely" and "High" values over time, including the cost of money
  • Returns can be in the form of: NPV Standard Deviation, NPV Distribution, NPV Mean, ROI, ROI to Date, ROI to Go, IRR, Payback Period and Payback Period Distribution

APM enhanced by enterprise architecture

You can compare the APM analysis results to the application inventory in System Architect using the Focal "Point-System Architect" integration, visualize the APM results as analytics on the architecture, and do cause-effect analysis on the business. Create roadmaps for change. Assess the technical and business impact of application change.

APM feeding project portfolio management

APM feeds the project portfolio management process - create project proposals for taking action to address the cost of management and maintenance of applications. Actions can range from modernizing or discontinuing applications to new development.

Roadmap of applications plotted against time over histogram of resources available