Application Landscape Business, Technical and Operations Review

How well does the existing System Portfolio support the business needs and their existing system(s)? What is working and what is not is an important consideration. Does the business understand the systems available to them and the functions and features of each? When reviewing the business, take time to understand how the business currently uses the data held within the system.

Application operational problems can increase over time, to a point when the operational risk reaches a level deemed to be unacceptable. A consequence of failure would then be detrimental to the daily business process. The different components of the application landscape can jointly or individually increase the risk to an unacceptable level.

Maintaining the application landscape is far from straightforward. The business will demand cost reduction, infrastructure simplification, risk reduction or IT resource prioritisation onto key projects. Dependency on a few key resources to maintain the systems introduces new levels of risk if these resources become unavailable.

Fifth Step can provide a full review of all application across the complete landscape or a specific review of an individual application(s).

Business Review to cover:

• Training
• Knowledge of functions and features of the system (s)
• Business requirements met by applications
• Access to Data for analysis
• Missing functionality
• System bugs and non-working parts of the system
• Business workarounds
• System availability
• BCP Requirments

Technical Review to cover:

• Infrastructure status (is at end of life Hardware, operating system, database, application)
• System Performance Problems
• Database size constraints
• Security upgrade patch backlog
• Unsupported Operating System, database, application
• Increase in maintenance cost
• Increase in Hardware/System failures

Operations Review to cover:

• Quality and knowledge of support staff
• Software Development Lifecycle
• Operational difficulties, e.g. month end, overnight batch processing
• IT DR Plan testing
• Data backup process
• IT DR strategy compared to the business Systems Recovery Requirements. (RPO, RTO)
• System enhancement Change Request process
• Third Party’s ability to provide the correct level of support
• Support cost/model
• IT Budget incl baseline support & projects
• Failures due to the operational processes and procedures
• Application enhancement process, and issues
• Application strategy and 5-year road-map
• Adherence to regulatory compliance

So, to summarise, R.E.V.I.E.W!

• Review the current IT DR Plan, what level of testing is completed annually and whether the system's recovery schedule been
agreed with the business.
• Enable the third party vendors to support the applications running on their current level.
• View the support cost in terms of money or resources putting constraints on IT budget and other support/development projects.
• Investigate regular failures with the application landscape that cause downtime for the business. Are there regular nightly batch process failures that require 24x7 support?
• Empower a strategy underlying the application languages used across the applications. Are the systems difficult to maintain and is there the correct level of documentation on the systems.
• Warn the business where the runtime and/or support and maintenance cost is increasing to an unacceptable level. Is there an application enhancement backlog, with potential for regulatory changes that are waiting to be applied?

Fifth Step can provide a key findings report, a list of detailed findings, total cost of ownership report (TCO), risk assessment, road-map and plan. In my next blog, I will look at detailed reviews, next steps and bespoke initiatives – the essentials of change management, operations audit and application strategy.