Where to begin

The application portfolio is at the core of your company's IT landscape and running applications usually constitute the largest part of IT spending. Alfabet FastLane helps you manage your application portfolio so that you can oversee the application architecture, contain costs, and ensure that the IT support to the business is consistent and reliable. The health of your application landscape will have a direct impact on the success of the business capabilities they support.

The completeness of your data is critical to maximizing the benefits of Alfabet FastLane. Typically, some data will be imported to the repository by your portfolio administrator. As portfolio manager, you might update existing data or even add asset information to the repository. This may include capturing data about the business, application, information, and technology architectures as well as the projects that are relevant to the IT portfolio. All of the data about your company's assets does not have to be in the repository to start working with Alfabet FastLane. You can begin to capture data for the immediate task at hand and add more information later as needed.

As a portfolio manager, you are tasked with regularly assessing the quality of the data in your repository and initiating activities to ensure that the data is kept up-to-date. This is easy to do because data quality scores and data completeness are measured along all stages of IT portfolio management so that you always know how reliable your data is and where information gaps need to be addressed. Data quality assessments are available for each individual asset in the repository as well as for the data source used to examine a business question. You can work with the business questions in any order that you like, as long as enough good data is available for the data source.

Here's how you can begin:

	Review that the business architecture is documented since this is the business context for your IT. Document the application architecture since the application landscape is the core of most analysis. Other assets should be documented if they are required for a business question you are interested in.
	Focus on the business questions in the Governance and Transparency sections to ensure accountability for the assets in your IT and understand the current state of your as-is landscape.
	Next focus on the business questions in the Rationalization and Roadmapping sections in order to understand functional redundancies and dependencies in your IT as a basis to coordinate IT change efforts.
	Now your ready to explore the business questions in the Risk and Cloud sections to ensure continuity to the most critical areas of your business and identify cloud candidates in alignment with your migration strategy.