Assessment of your application and technology portfolio is best performed when you integrate portfolio analysis with enterprise architecture.
This enables you to understand the impact of changes before making decisions. Then you can build transition plans and manage your project portfolio to bring the organization to new, more efficient levels.
UNICOM® Focal Point™ enables you to do a thorough analysis of your IT portfolio against non-architectural data points such as costs, development bandwidth, or survey results. The System Architect®-Focal Point™ integration enables you to take those results and bank them off of the enterprise architecture, so you can do visual analytics on the architecture, and quickly understand how changes to the IT landscape will affect business owners, processes, services, and capabilities.
Application portfolio management
Rapidly create an application inventory in either System Architect or Focal Point. Map applications to Focal Point and run pre-provided reports to analyze and assess applications based on business and IT value, improvement potential, and risk. Score applications against defined, prioritized, and weighted business and technical criteria. Determine what applications should be moved to the cloud, re-architected for the cloud or mobile, retired, sustained, enhanced, consolidated, or replaced. Determine what applications should be developed as new mobile, cloud-aware, or cloud-native apps and what apps should be purchased.
Then bank the analysis results off of 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. Select and plan portfolio transformation initiatives, such as projects for decommissioning or modernizing applications.
Technology portfolio management
Understand how changes to your application portfolio impact your technology portfolio - and vice versa. Use the enterprise architecture to assess what technologies are being used in applications and systems across the organization, where they are being used, and what effects technology risks have on the business.
Identify technology innovations that can provide new capabilities for the business. In Focal Point, assess new technologies and do trade-off analysis of their features, benefits, costs and market acceptance. Back in System Architect, use the enterprise architecture to help implement governance of chosen technology standards. Then build roadmaps of new technologies, their projected costs, and the capabilities they will provide.
Project portfolio management
Use enterprise architecture to move project portfolio management out of its vacuum. Align projects and sub-projects to the capabilities they enable, the business strategies they support, and the IT portfolio they change. Map the projects to Focal Point, where your steering committee can prioritize projects based on predefined sets of criteria such as strategic fit, architectural fit, business risk, budget constraints, manpower constraints, targeted portfolio reductions, cost savings, or your own attribute set. Identify which projects are higher priority based on the needs of the business, and determine the best project portfolio mix given the constraints of manpower and costs.
Map the analysis from Focal Point back to the enterprise architecture, use analytics to visualize the project portfolio analysis, and assess the cause-effect of prioritized projects on the enterprise. Armed with this information, you have a much higher degree of confidence for what transformation projects to pursue.
