Mountains

Essential Playbook – Play 1

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)

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