Overview of business questions

The business question What is our application portfolio? offers a comprehensive analysis of the applications in your IT and ensures a single source of truth about your application portfolio.

Get an overview of the business capabilities that are supported by the most applications, which organizations own the most applications, the object states of the applications in the application portfolio, and the numbers of applications in application groups. Review a master list of all applications including indicators and the most important information about their relationships to other assets in the IT architecture.

The business question What is our technology portfolio? offers a comprehensive analysis of the components in your IT and ensures a single source of truth about your technology portfolio.

Get an overview of the IT capabilities that are supported by the most components, which organizations own the most components, and the object states of the components in the technology portfolio. Review a master list of all components including indicators and the most important information about their relationships to other assets in the IT architecture.

The business question What is our technical debt? shows applications and the components that the applications use and helps you understand the critical dependence that applications have on the technological components that they rely on to run.

Look for applications that will not be able to provide support to the business due to end-of-life technologies. This business question helps you to identify at-risk applications that are critical to the business and derive the necessary measures to mitigate potential risk before an application or component goes out of service.

The business question Who are our vendors? provides insight to your company's reliance on vendors.

Understand which vendors provide components that your applications are dependent on and which vendors support mission-critical business capabilities. Review whether your company is at risk due to too much reliance on a single vendor or whether you might consolidate vendors in order to benefit from preferential rates from a single strategic technology partner.

The business question What are our architectural dependencies? helps you to identify how application complexity may be reduced, understand the business data that may be at risk, and assess potential challenges to application migration.

Review the flow chart to understand the information flows for the selected application. Incoming information flows start with the source application and point to the selected application. Outgoing information flows start with the selected application and point to the target application. Point to an information flow to show a tooltip with the following information: Source application > target application.

The business question Which business areas require the most IT support? provides a snapshot of the as-is application landscape organized according to the business processes they support.

Identify application-dense business processes and understand whether redundant applications can be rationalized. Review where application support is missing for critical business processes in order to identify potential risks early.

The business question Which contracts should we review? shows the lifecycles of applications and components as well as the contracts that provide them.

Review contracts with impending end dates in order to make informed decisions about architectural changes based on your contracts with IT suppliers or service providers. Understand which contracts are associated with a particular vendor and ensure that license usage is in line with the contact deliverables. This business question helps you to manage your contract library, minimize planning risk, and avoid unnecessary costs.

The business question What is our service catalog? consolidates the most important information about the service portfolio in one place and helps to establish a single-source of truth for the service portfolio data. Maintaining an enterprise-wide service catalog saves time in project scoping and ensures that risks are mitigated when changes are made to the service landscape.

The business question Where are our applications deployed? helps you to understand where applications are located and provides a quick overview about the deployment hotspots. The information is a source of input about security and disaster recovery activities for locations with critical applications.

The business question Who is responsible for our assets? shows which users and organizations have a functional role for each asset in the repository.

Use the filters to find assets that are not assigned to any role at all or to review the assets assigned to a specific role. Fix missing role definitions on the spot to improve data quality, ensure accountability for your IT assets, and close the gaps on data responsibility.

The business question Who owns which applications? helps you to ensure that organizational responsibility is documented for all applications in the application portfolio. Understand which organizations are the business owners and IT owners of applications and which applications have no organizational ownership defined. Look for gaps in organizational responsibility to mitigate risk to your company's IT infrastructure.

The business question What is our standards catalog? shows the components that are assigned to the IT capability model.

Identify the use of components that are not permitted and reduce non-standard technologies. Understand the importance of technologies due the business in terms of the application usage and supports cost reduction by promoting standards.

The business question What should we be focusing on? shows the business capability model with a view to the as-is and to-be application landscapes. The business question helps you decide which applications to invest in, migrate, or divest based on the criticality of the business capabilities they support.

The business question Who owns our technologies? helps you to ensure that organizational responsibility is documented for all components in the technology portfolio. Understand which organizations are the IT owners or operations responsible of components and which components have no organizational ownership defined.

Look for gaps in organizational responsibility to mitigate risk to your company's IT infrastructure.

The What is our OPEX Distribution? business question provides an overview of your applications and their costs.

The analytics visualize the current and planned application budgets on a yearly basis and identify the most important rationalization candidates. This business question helps you to understand whether your applications are in budget and on time.

Set filters for each view to understand application costs for business owner organizations, business capabilities, and various application groups. Review your current year applications per cost type and development type so that you understand OPEX trends and streamline the application portfolio.

The What is our CAPEX Distribution? is business question provides an overview of your projects and their costs.

The analytics visualize the current and planned project budgets on a yearly basis and identify the most important investment and divestment candidates. This business question helps you to understand whether your projects are in budget and on time.

Set filters for each view to understand project costs for business owner organizations, business capabilities, and various project groups. Review your current year projects per cost type so that you understand CAPEX trends, optimize project planning, and streamline the investment portfolio.

The business question What are our cost drivers? visualizes business capabilities based on their costs. It helps you to differentiate between critical and standard business capabilities, identify the major cost drivers in the organization, and make sound rationalization and investment decisions.

The business question What are our investment and retirement candidates? looks at application scores and helps you to decide where to focus rationalization activities.

Review the business and technical scores of an application when making decisions about whether it is best to keep an application, invest in the application, consider the application as a migration candidate, or sundown the application. Compare the recommendations that were made for each application with the real-world business and technical scores and consider which applications may qualify as candidates to invest or retire in order to meet rationalization goals.

The business question What is the status of our rationalization plan? shows the number of new and retired applications and helps you to understand whether they are in alignment with the agreed rationalization plan.

Analyze the number of new and retired applications for different time periods and review the costs for the new and retired applications. This business question allows you to carry out a trend analysis and assess the financial impact of your rationalization activities.

The business question What are our service overlaps? helps you to quickly identify the overlap of business services and support services due to common IT assets. Review the services impacted by an IT asset and establish clear objectives for service delivery in order to minimize risk and reduce the number of service collisions.

The business question What are our cloud focus areas? highlights the applications that are best suited for migration based on their cloud relevance and cloud readiness indicators. It helps you to understand the degree of benefits vs. difficulty for the migration of an application to the cloud.

The analysis provides a top-down portfolio analysis to help you migrate your cloud portfolio using a strategic approach. Review the application scores when making decisions about your company's cloud migration portfolio. Compare the strategic cloud migration recommendations that were made for each application with the real-world scores based on cloud relevance and cloud readiness and consider which applications qualify as candidates to migrate or retire in order to meet modernization and rationalization goals.

The business question What is our cloud migration strategy? looks at application scores regarding cloud relevance and cloud readiness and helps you to decide which applications to migrate to the cloud.

Review the migration and retirement candidates and adjust necessary migration strategy recommendations. Consider what the potential impact the migration of applications will be on your company's business capabilities.

The business question What is our application landscape? helps you to understand the business capabilities supported by the application landscape. Analyze the current and planned application landscape based on various indicators to identify potential risks to your IT portfolio roadmap as well as rationalization opportunities for your business.

The business question What is our target architecture? shows a high-level overview of the target state of the IT architecture.

The visualization is a business support map that depicts the business support , which is the relationship between the application that is used by an organization in order to provide a business capability. Granular planning of the business support supports application rollout plans across the organizations and business capabilities. This business question helps you to understand the dependencies between the organizations and business capabilities in your company and identify potential redundancies or gaps in business support.

The business question What is our application roadmap? shows when applications are planned to be implemented and when they will no longer provide support to the business.

A robust application lifecycle management includes versioning and planning for successor applications to ensure that IT continues to support critical business areas. Look for applications that are approaching their end-of-life but have no successor applications planned. This business question helps you to identify gaps in application support and take corrective action for applications that are at risk.

The business question What is our vendor roadmap? shows contracts from both the vendor perspective as well as the buyer perspective.

Review contract lifecycles and costs as well as the applications and components that the contracts provide. Manage contract renewal dates in a timely manner by ensuring that successor contracts are available in order to mitigate risks to your enterprise. This business questions sheds light on which products and services your organization is buying so that you can consolidate software purchasing and optimize costs by using preferred third-party vendors.

The business question What is our technology roadmap? shows when components are planned to be implemented and when they will no longer provide IT support to the business.

Review component lifecycles and understand which applications they support. Look for components that are approaching their end-of-life but have no successor components planned. This business question helps you to identify gaps in technology support and take corrective action for components that are at risk.

The business question What is our service landscape? helps you to understand the business services and support services in the service landscape based on a snapshot of the service groups in which they are categorized. Review the service catalog with an understanding to the IT assets that deliver the business services and support services.

This business questions helps to identify risks due to potential gaps in the service portfolio. Identify opportunities for rationalization activities in service-dense service groups.

The business question What is our service roadmap? provides a comprehensive overview of the business services and support services that are implemented and when they will reach end-of-life.

Look for business services and support services that are approaching their end-of-life but have no successor services planned. Identify gaps in the service portfolio and take corrective action for business services and support services that are at risk.

The business question What is our demand pipeline? allows you to manage the demand funnel so that you have up-to-date information about your company's priorities.

The business question visualizes the demand pipeline based on their statuses and priorities. A Kanban report lets you move demands to different lanes that indicate the different stages of approval. A doughnut chart helps you to understand demands based on their criticality for your company. Review the demands early in the change process to streamline and control future workloads and ensure an optimal allocation of resources in the enterprise.

The business question Which demands should be realized? looks at demand scores and helps you to assess demands and prioritize your company's activities.

Review the business value and architectural impact scores of a demand as well as the risks to the projects associated. Adjust the weighting of indicators such as cost savings or innovation to understand what the demand has to offer to the business or how it will impact the architecture. Understand which organizations are submitting demands when you make decisions about which demands to focus on and invest in.

The business question Who are our service providers and consumers? highlights how organizations provide business services and consume business services. Review the business service ownership in IT departments as well as the distribution of the business service consumption across organizations. This business question helps you recognize dependencies, hedge risks, and plan for back up options.

The business question What are our most important projects? provides visibility about the most important projects in the project portfolio and helps you to recognize when projects are at risk.

Get an overview of the organizations that own the most projects, the project groups with the most projects, and the business capabilities impacted by the most projects. Review a master list of all projects with a special focus on the RAG (Red, Amber, Green) status value for each project to quickly identify if management action is required for a project.

The business question What are our project overlaps? helps you to quickly identify the stakeholders impacted by an architectural change. Review the projects impacting an IT asset and establish clear objectives for project delivery in order to minimize risk and reduce the number of project conflicts.

The business question Where are our project dependencies? provides a high-level view of how projects affect each other. The business question shows project and their dependencies to other projects due to issues of time, architecture, or resources. Additionally, you can discover which architecture elements are targeted by multiple projects in order to better manage projects.

This business question supports full transparency about project dependencies when prioritizing projects for funding and/or execution. Dependencies can be analyzed across multiple programs to foster communication before project's are approved.

The business question What is the status of our project portfolio? shows an overview of the project portfolio with a view to all projects from start to finish.

Review project monitoring indicators to indicate whether projects are within the budget and resource allotment. Understand project dependencies and keep track that project milestones are met on time. This business question helps you to understand changes as they occur and react before a project becomes unmanageable and threatens to fail.

The business question How do we manage our program flow ? allows features and user stories to be prioritized based on the methodology Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJ). Features are evaluated based on their cost of delay and estimated job size in story points to understand the duration of the feature. Relevant features can be moved to the next phase of the feature lifecycle.

The business question How will IT failure impact our business? provides a high-level end-to-end view of your IT technology landscape.

Review your business' reliance on locations and servers and highlight the susceptibility of applications and the business capabilities they support. Understand the dependencies that critical business capabilities have on the IT in order to mitigate risk before an IT outage occurs.

The business question Where do we use sensitive data? shows a CRUD matrix so that you can understand how an application uses business data.

This business question helps you to identify inconsistencies and redundancies in the way business data are used in the IT landscape. Review which applications process sensitive data, what kind of data is being handled, and what the application does with this data to identify potential risks you to your company's sensitive data.

The business question Where do we have technology risk? shows the business capability model focusing on the components used by the applications that support the business. For each business capability, understand the risk to components providing functional support and the remaining time that the vendor will support the component.

The business question helps you to understand risks to the business due to the discontinuation of technology support as well as to identify areas to standardize and rationalize components in technology-dense business capabilities.

The business question Where do we have SLA violations? examines the service level agreements for business services and their support services and compares the indicators of the SLAs. The visualization highlights where support services do not provide enough support to the business service and where violations are occurring with service level agreements. This business question helps you to understand the business service demand and the support service supply chain and identify risk due to inconsistencies in the supply chain.

The business question What is our security score? provides a high level overview of the application risk assessment. It helps identify the most critical applications based on their CIA score ( Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability) in the application portfolio. This business question helps your enterprise comply with regulations by identifying yet-to-be assessed applications so that you can initiate activites to capture the required compliance data .