Datasheet
www.microsoft.com/office/portfolioserver/
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Application Portfolio Management (APM) Scenario: Sidney Higa, CIO of Wide World
Importers, desperately needed to get more visibility into her application portfolio. More
than 70 percent of the annual IT budget went to supporting existing applications across
the organization, and Sidney needed a better understanding of how this expense
contributed to the business. Sidney wanted to rationalize her portfolio, but she did not
have a solid grasp of the number of applications deployed at Wide World Importers, and
what business value they provided. She did know that different applications were used in
silos across lines of business and geographies, and wanted to understand if there were
redundant applications that could be consolidated or retired altogether.
As a first step, Sidney instructed her team to create an inventory of all the applications at
Wide World Importers in the Portfolio Builder module of Office Project Portfolio Server
2007. The team agreed on which key metrics and standard descriptive attributes to
capture in order to effectively evaluate the applications, including metrics for annual cost,
architectural fit, process contribution, risk, and operational performance. The team then
began to create the inventory.
One important metric, the process contribution assessment, included mapping each
application to the standard library of organizational business processes. That information
populated Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 report templates, enabling Sidney’s team
to identify functional overlap between applications that support the same business
processes, and to highlight opportunities for better application integration. After running
the report, Sidney noticed some key processes were supported by multiple enterprise
resource planning (ERP) applications, suggesting a functional overlap and a potential
opportunity to rationalize these ERP applications.
Upon completing the application repository, Sidney now had reliable visibility into the
status of her application portfolio, with the core data and a foundation to effectively
rationalize the portfolio and make application life cycle decisions.