What is Application Rationalization? Its Benefits & How to do it?

Application Rationalization is a strong element that strengthens the IT field & its transmutation capabilities. It is based on thorough evaluation aligned with efforts & company goals. Application rationalization means selecting your apps based on business & priority related actions, monitoring the changing priorities, analyzing app real time value, continuous review, adjustment, effective management of applications etc.

What is Application Portfolio Rationalization?

With the help of APR, organizations can easily migrate from one platform to another, decrease the application development cost & improve the delivery of applications. Basically, APR includes shuffling & improvement of the present application portfolio, elimination of useless functions, re-platforming, the retirement of non-valued apps, migration of the application to more advanced platforms.

Application Rationalization is one of the important steps in transforming IT environment to get revolution. It helps the companies to deeply understand their application portfolio which helps in building better application transformation roadmap. The road-map plays a very important role in the execution of the transformation.

Nowadays, many IT organizations are planning for migrating their applications to latest technology platforms. These latest technologies are fruitful if priority is given to the apps that run through a rationalization initiative.

Steps for Successful Application Rationalization

Identify the Actual Cost of Each Application

Identifying the actual costing of the application portfolio includes costs of infrastructure, operations, licensed software support, direct app support, app maintenance, small modifications etc.

Analyze the Functional & Technical Quality of Each Application

Analyze what are the functional and technical qualities of your application and combine them to determine the overall business value.

Manage Cost and Business Value

Manage the overall cost of the application and the business value. Determine, how much money is spent on maintaining, manufacturing of the application & money spent on HR as well as other resources.

Create a Road Map

Create a detailed roadmap including the set of actions and business case to easily understand the applications transformation and quality improvement. The initiative should give special importance to quality improvement, decrease overall cost, elimination of useless functions.

Maintaining a clear road map is the key to getting the desired business value. By following the appropriate roadmap, companies can reduce their mobile application cost as well as the organizational structures needed for the operation of an enterprise.

Build Business Case

Build the business case to showcase the business & financial value of transforming the applications portfolio. A strong business case help to achieve the business objectives. The business case impacts on the efficiency of business processes as well as reduce the initiative cost.

Benefits of Application Rationalization

There are huge benefits of APR. You can manage a complete inventory of apps that enables the enterprises to reduce duplicate ones. You can also reduce the complexity of apps through modernization projects.

Here are some of the benefits of managing your application portfolio rationalization:

Cost Saving for Enterprises

Application Rationalization is highly beneficial to save the cost. These savings can be applied to the application that truly serves the needs of the business. A case study by Infosys says that APR can lead to the cost saving of more than US$ 2 million.

Reduce the Unnecessary Investments

APR implies the complete evaluation of each application with its contribution to the business success. This evaluation leads to the reduction in unnecessary investment for resources as well as another support cost. Instead, it focuses on the actual investment that needs to achieve the exact business goals.

Reduce Support Requirements

Usually, the applications require additional support from either your own company employees or vendors. With the proper use of technologies and resources, the support cost can be reduced.

Minimize Future App Purchases

Application portfolio management(APM) help the organizations to take decisions regarding deployment of the applications & their benefits for business. Enterprises can easily get an idea about what are their present benefits and what will they get in future. In case, if organizations are not benefited with the app, they can minimize the future app purchases.

Conclusion

Application rationalization brings a lot of benefits to businesses from saving billion dollars to improved efficiency and business value. The successful deployment of rationalization plan requires the organizations to define definite goals combined with the understanding of core business values.

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