I have worked on several Application Portfolio Assessment Rationalization projects. All such engagements started with objectives to reduce TCO (total cost of operations), simplify the product and technology landscape, identify inefficiencies and redundancies across processes and applications and create a flexible landscape that helps accelerate transformation deployment. The primary outcomes were to create a vision of the end state that allows flexibility in adopting technological innovations and a clear view of the impact across business capabilities, process landscape and application portfolio.

The typical method to deliver such engagements begins with gathering information about the overall system and application architecture, process models across the enterprise, application inventory, integration landscape, technology stack, databases, operating systems, and product or application vendors. As part of the data gathering exercise, we also spent significant effort in understanding the architecture principles and standards defined by the enterprise and if these need to be updated given the changing business and technology landscape. The next step was to process the information and build an integrated view of this information, such as mapping applications, technology, or products to a level 3 process. This phase also included having several workshops with enterprise architects, process owners and IT managers to validate the data and integrated view of the data. The final stage of such engagements was to develop a point of view on the current enterprise architecture strategy and list all the application optimization opportunities. The list was then discussed with relevant stakeholders in workshop mode to arrive at and confirm these opportunities and create a roadmap.

Most of the time in these engagements was spent on gathering and validating information and very little time discussing and deciding on rationalization opportunities. If I put this in the perspective of project duration or effort, around 70-75% of the time was spent on data collection & validation and remaining on discussing opportunities for rationalization and building the roadmap. This approach resulted in a rushed process for a critical phase of the application portfolio rationalization engagements.

Ideally, I would like to spend over 80% of the project time discussing business and IT pain points, inefficiencies and redundancies, optimization opportunities, building the roadmap for the future and less than 20% time gathering and validating information. This approach is possible if you adopt LeanIX for Enterprise Architecture Management.

I recently evaluated LeanIX for Enterprise Architecture Management and its integration with Signavio. My quick view on the tool:

1. LeanIX enables one-time information gathering and allows you to update the information as part of day-to-day enterprise architecture management activities.
2. Your application portfolio rationalization project can prioritize ways to meet key objectives and create desired outcomes faster than before.
3. The impact of a transformation on users, technology, applications, processes, and business capability is easier to visualize as compared to the manual approach.
4. The integration between LeanIX and Signavio works both ways, and you can easily choose to define the source of truth. For example, you can maintain application inventory in LeanIX, make it available in Signavio through integration and use it to update your business process model steps with the application.
5. LeanIX provides information dashboards in reports and diagrams on various dimensions such as application inventory, end-of-life views, interface views, world maps of applications, data flow diagrams, etc.

Once you fully leverage LeanIX capabilities, I foresee application portfolio rationalization becoming a continuous improvement activity of the enterprise architecture management team.

Please share your experience of using LeanIX and its integration with Signavio.