Enterprise View | APPLICATION PORTFOLIO

Particularly as companies grow, they implement point solutions to satisfy the needs of individual departments. This often includes one-off tools and systems from different vendors, which are cobbled together point solutions. There are often interfaces between the systems that shuttle information back and forth. As any CIO knows, what often results is a fragile spiderweb of systems where a change in one part of the system results in a breakage in another. One company referred to this as a hairball, which is an accurate description. With data duplicated and stored in multiple systems, there is no single version of the truth as reports from departments and systems have slightly different data.

When looking at the overall costs of maintaining duplicate or overlapping systems, as well as the overhead of maintaining duplicate data, the total cost of ownership of a hairball application portfolio is high. Although it is a high entry cost scenario to design systems for the whole enterprise, over the long run it saves money for an organization because you are able to reuse data and logic.

It is important for a company to practice integration management to engineer the applications as a whole. When designing applications, reduce the number of interfaces between applications. Typically, interfaces take the most resources and costs to support over the long run.

Changing the applications portfolio to take an enterprise view is not just an IT issue but also a business issue. The individual business departments are typically accustomed to getting a solution when they want it and they do not have to coordinate or involve other departments. Changing to an enterprise view requires support from the top of the organization as you need to override the needs of one department for the benefit of the entire organization. One way to make the transition from a point-solution approach to an enterprise view is to be part of an overall assessment and strategic planning process that looks at the business needs and applications in total.