Application Portfolio Management and Optimization

Application Portfolio Management (APM) and Optimization

Application Portfolio Management (APM) is a framework for managing enterprise IT software applications and software-based services. APM provides organizations with an inventory of the company’s software applications and metrics to illustrate the business benefits of each application.

Knowsys’ services are focused upon looking at applications as assets and technical debt. Technical Debt is defined as a measure that estimates the effort to correct all instances of the 86 weaknesses included in the CISQ Automated Quality Characteristic Measures that remain in a software application’s code at release. This estimate can be used to predict future corrective maintenance costs. The cost to fix structural quality problems constitutes the principal of the debt, while the inefficiencies they cause, such as greater maintenance effort or excessive computing resources, represent interest on the debt. The measure expresses the cost of software quality in terms a business can understand by estimating future corrective maintenance costs to remedy structural defects in code.

Our APM solution allows us to leverage technology to review, prioritize, and risk-manage enterprise portfolios of unlimited numbers of applications within a few days.

Knowsys can also assess the health and effectiveness of specific applications in great depth.

Our focus is to help you assess:

Software Resiliency – Robustness and Risk Mitigation;
Software Agility – Supports ease of maintainability and transferability; and
Software Elegance – Calculates complexity and ease of modernizing/digitizing applications.

Software Resiliency, Agility, and Elegance

Software Health

Portfolio Health Measures: Robustness, Efficiency, Security, Changeability, Transferability, Complexity, Cloud Readiness

Software Blueprints

Application Discovery, map and visualize software structure and architecture, architectural and impact analysis.

Software Size

Functional and Technical Sizing to assess quantity of work

Software Flaws

Software Health Measures: Technical debt and flaws that create potential outages, security breaches, and data corruption

Software Benchmarks

Accurate, consistent analytics by industry and geography, normalized by functional size, and based on structural data of thousands of software systems. Over 2500+ applications and 3B lines of code. Annual industry reports and custom benchmarking.

Benefits of using Knowsys for your next APM initiative:

The ability to independently verify and validate the cost or value improvements associated with the quality and risk profile of an application. This is a cornerstone to good governance, but few organizations apply this approach to demonstrate objective value and risk. This approach can be used internally, but more importantly it can be used to manage outsourcing vendors to create crisp performance metrics and the fees associated thereof.
Knowsys leverages CISQ (Consortium for IT Software Quality) to mature your company’s APM practices.
CISQ solves the problem of software quality and sourcing by creating objective (industry standard), practical, and quantifiable value associated with software quality.
Historically, software quality has been a nebulous field with unclear and hard to measure benefits and value. With the concepts of technical debt and total cost of ownership beginning to take root in industry, CISQ can now translate these concepts into specific quality criteria, finally closing the loop between quality and financial and risk management. Finally, with CISQ, we now have a common language to speak about software quality the way we do about IT process and governance (COBIT), SDLC (CMM), IT Service Management (ITIL/ITSM), Architecture (TOGAF) to name a few industry standards.

Are any of these a concern for you?

Increasing the speed of delivery without compromising quality in digitizing content, information, and assets for consumption by customers;
Demonstrating cost savings or value of software and applications as they relate to the business strategy;
Justifying the cost of modernization, given an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” philosophy by most businesses;
Being able to clearly articulate what technical debt is and how reducing it is tied to cost savings;
Effectively managing the performance of vendors and internal organizations to demonstrate value, risk reduction, and cost reduction in some cases;
Having the flexibility to redeploy staff to different technology platforms based on business needs. Accessing the right talent to enable this flexibility;
Understanding how deficiencies in code quality are compromising information security risk and proactively mitigating this risk before it appears in the newspapers.