Applications Rationalization

Every IT application portfolio accumulates non-essential, redundant, and under-performing applications from mergers and acquisitions, technical and business strategy shifts, and the aftereffects of years of maintenance. These applications provide minimal business value while robbing scarce resources from more valuable pursuits. Through our Applications Rationalization services, BPO Systems helps clients streamline their portfolio, delivering quantifiable business benefits, including:

• Reduced operating costs and improved bottom-line performance.
• Increased flexibility to reallocate budget dollars and redirect staff to more strategic endeavors.
• Renewed focus on business critical applications and value adding activities.

 Low-Value Applications Demand Attention

An asset is not an asset if its cost exceed the value that it delivers.  Yet every IT organization supports applications that are disproportionately expensive to the level of business value they produce.  These applications draw funds and resources away from opportunities that produce higher value, affect a company’s ability to respond rapidly to changing requirements, and resist easy integration with other initiatives. Low-value applications are an inevitable side effect of business and technology change:

• As applications age, they decline in quality, resulting in higher maintenance costs, increased demand on support resources, and diverted attention from more valuable business pursuits

• As organizations grow, they frequently acquire redundant, incompatible, or overlapping applications, unnecessarily compounding support burdens and increasing the risk of errors from maintaining duplicative code

• As priorities change, older technologies languish, replaced by  newer, more powerful, and more strategic counterparts; supporting  outdated technologies wastes resources better spent on core, strategic initiatives

• Although IT organizations devote significant attention to the development and application management phases of the Application Lifecycle, few focus on the impact of applications as they reach the end of their lifecycle.  Left unchecked, low-value applications continue to accumulate over time, placing an increasing burden on IT resources while providing steadily declining business value.

Rational Approach To Recapturing Business Value

BPO’s Applications Rationalization solution is a fast and effective means of unlocking the budget, staff, and business value trapped within low-value applications. Taking a pragmatic, investment oriented view of applications.

Applications Rationalization identifies under-performing applications, restores still useful applications, merges and eliminates redundant applications, and replaces and retires end-of-life applications.

At the start of an Applications Rationalization engagement, BPO business consultants analyze the condition and business value of the applications within the portfolio, identify opportunities for improvement, and create a prioritized action list to maximize the benefits of rationalization. Recommended actions may include any combination of the following:

Eliminate Redundant Applications – Costly to support, redundant applications provide little or no incremental benefit over proper use of a single application. BPO identifies instances of overlapping functionality and works with its clients to select the strongest version. Where necessary, BPO will merge non-redundant functionality and clean up and migrate data from the eliminated applications.

Retire End-of-Life Applications – If the cost to operate and support an application exceeds the value that it can provide to the business, BPO recommends that it be retired or replaced by a new, less costly application. If desired, BPO can assist with the development or acquisition of the replacement application.

Renovate Worthwhile Applications – With a little help, many under-performing applications can still add value to the business. A combination of technical quality restoration and targeted functional improvements can extend the application’s life span while reducing its cost of maintenance. Migrating an older application to a newer, more strategic platform improves its flexibility and scalability while eliminating the overhead of supporting and obsolete platform.

A Partner for Complete Application Lifecycle

Gaining high returns from an application portfolio requires extensive expertise and partner with a long-term commitment to excellence. As the premier provider of Application Lifecycle Optimization services, BPO offers a full range of IT and business consulting services that help organizations maximize the business value of their application investments. From development to management to rationalization, our Application Lifecycle Optimization services offer a systematic, proactive, and investment-oriented approach to managing diverse and evolving application portfolios. Our expertise in operations improvement and business transformation enables us to address the business issues that drive portfolio evolution. And BPO’s unrivaled track record in project management ensures the success of every engagement. If you want to get more from you application portfolio, let BPO put its strengths to work for you.

Executive Overview 

• Reduce cost and complexity of your applications portfolio

• Eliminate redundant functionality

• Optimize assets and leverage across different applications and functions

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