What is Application Rationalization (AR)?

Definition of Application Rationalization

Application rationalization (AR) fundamentally represents reshuffling your existing portfolio based on analyzing all applications of your enterprises according to their efficiency, complexity, cost, business value, etc. After doing that analysis, businesses determine which applications should be kept or not. But you need to understand AR is not a one-time analysis of applications, it should be a continuous process that monitors all applications constantly, determining the life cycles and with this information they offer a continuous improvement of your software. According to the results, you may want to refresh your hardware, make programmatic changes, or rearrange your contracts.

Why Enterprises Need Application Rationalization?

With the development of technology and the digital transformation that emerged with this development, the quantity of software and applications in businesses has increased significantly. The increase in the number of applications and software in businesses has brought about a new need: Application Portfolio Management (APM). That is a very good start for the digitalization of the enterprise. But without AR system, this change and adoption remain incomplete.

Let us talk about what will you lose if you do not have an AR system. The main objective of the AR system is to classify your applications according to specific properties and to gather all your applications in one place, to manage them in one place and by doing that let you have a proper portfolio that will help you see your applications visually, determining the total cost of your applications, reducing complexity, eliminating redundant ones and much more. That is why application rationalization is essential for your business. Without an AR system, your business can’t have a fully organized IT landscape, can’t decrease the cost, can’t be able to organize and modernize your software and can not have a proper change plan concerning your software.

Key Metrics for Application Portfolio Management

How do you Approach Application Rationalization?

For a successful application rationalization, there are several steps. Let us try to state the most important ones.

• Gather the data required to create an inventory of your applications.
• Determine the map of your applications.
• Identify the life cycle of your applications.
• Determine the business value of each application in your portfolio.
• Create an application architecture framework.
• Make the process continuous by monitoring constantly your applications.

These are the most critical points to rationalize your portfolio, of course, there are more complicated work and more steps behind the scenes. As a result, application rationalization is a concept that you have to apply to your existing portfolio to adapt your business and benefit from all the qualities that we have mentioned above.

What is Application Portfolio Management?

Application Portfolio Management (APM) is one of the most important business processes that you will need to realize an application rationalization. Application Portfolio Management is the framework that covers businesses to manage their on-premise, cloud, SaaS, PaaS and all other applications throughout their lifecycle.

We as “Loggle” try to help you by offering an Application Portfolio Management Framework which respects all principles of Application Rationalization and gathering these two important concepts as one in an APM framework to make your job easier and more efficient. Do not hesitate to learn more about Loggle.