Play 1 – Anchor on Applications, Bring in Business Elements
- Difficulty: Easy to moderate
- Target time: 4-8 weeks
- Maturity: 0 to 1 1 to 2
- There is no enterprise architecture
- Application Rationalisation is an initiative
- An efficiency drive
- There is little visibility of IT
- A want to build credibility
- No single application catalogue
- Disparate applications list
- Limited business capability knowledge
- Communication to relevant IT teams from senior leader
- A business contact with knowledge of the business
- Publish an up to date application catalogue
- Engage the CIO by using the application catalogue as an anchor to create an application reference model and then identify duplication within the application estate from a capability perspective
- Engage the business and overlay the business perspective and identify where they have potential duplication within their architecture.
- Start with one business area and complete that first as a demonstrator
- Bring in costs for applications
- Overlay application interdependencies to see complexity
- Having a single accessible application list is always well received
- The CIO initiates detailed investigation into rationalisation against the identified applications – architecture credibility builds
- The business begin to understand their applications and ask IT how to rationalise – architecture begins to become a business partner
- Business Executive – Capability Model validation
- Business Analyst – Capability model creation and high-level processes
- Application Owners – application information
- Service Management Teams – application information
- Finance – costs
- Engage and have regular updates with the CIO and a ‘friendly’ business area executive
- Once the application catalogue has a reasonable set of applications, begin to communicate more widely
- Engage other business areas once you have one done
- EA Team in place
- Enterprise Architecture begins to get visibility
- Ability to plan development to meet short term business need – clarity as to why things are being delivered
| Steps | A1.1 | A1.2 | B1.1 | B1.2 | S1.5 | A1.4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What | Capture the applications with basic details and services | Create the application reference model and map applications | Create the business capability model with the BA, validate with Executive | Identify the high-level processes and map applications that use them | Get costs for applications that are prime for review | Identify inter-dependencies for applications that are prime for review |
| Usage | Have a list of applications used that can be the anchor for the rest of the work. Define strategic applications in line with your target state | Identify duplicate application candidates from an application perspective. Initial view, provides focus for the business work | Will be the anchor for application duplication from a business perspective | Enables identification of duplicate application candidates in the business. | Use costs to identify which candidates are worth chasing | Use complexity to gauge the work required in rationalising the candidate |
| Interested Parties and expected response | Business & IT Interested but not excited | CIO Interested, keen to discover more | Business Interested | Business & CIO Interested, keen to discover more. Initiate cost review activities | Business & CIO Actively interested, want high-level business case | Business & CIO Actively Interested, want business case and action plan |
| Approach | By Business Unit/Area | By Business Unit/Area | Overall Enterprise | By Business Areas (Target based on A1.2 output) | By Business Areas (Target based on A1.2 output) | By Business Areas (Target based on A1.2 output) |