Having recently gone through a personal disruption related to employment, I dusted off my copy of Who Moved My Cheese? After re-reading the book, I thought about how this applies to the life of the CIO and application portfolio management. We are all too often with the world we understand and the 80% (or more) of the budget it consumes – failing to Sniff out opportunities.
Recently there was a post: CIOs make the tough call on legacy systems by Mary K. Pratt that delved into the issue of managing the layer upon layer of project success that builds up to calcify an organization’s ability to respond, that I found a worthwhile read.
Even in this day of IaaS and SaaS, the basics of optimizing the application portfolio of an organization remains relatively unchanged. It gets down to where the organization is headed and an assessment of costs vs. value generation.
Organizations need to ask some fundamental questions like:
- What needs to be done and why?
- How is it going to be accomplished?
- What is the expected outcome?
- When will it be needed or done?
- How will we measure outcomes, so we can validate that the task is complete and effective?
- What resources will be required? ($$, people…)
Essentially an assessment of leading and lagging indicators and how the portfolio can support them.
A simple view of the assessment is summed up in this quadrant chart:
I am sure there are other complex and wonderful interpretations of this, but to me this view is the simplest. Keep what adds value and has a low cost to operate. Refactor those programs (where possible) that have a high cost to maintain and also add high value. Validate the need for anything that delivers low value – you may be surprised how many of these you can turn off. Finally, replace those that have business support and high cost.
In this age of automation, the concepts of cost need to be holistic and not just the IT maintenance costs… For a parity of Who Moved My Cheese? touching on automation look to this Abstruse Goose illustration.
It is not hard to start but it is constantly changing so it may never be done.
Beyond the intersection of technology and life 