The Application Landscape: Symptoms of an Unhealthy Environment

This is the first in a series of Fifth Step Blogs designed to give CIOs and IT leaders an insight into an Application Landscape Review. My purpose is to provide CIOs, IT Leaders and their Business Heads with a methodology to help them manage their applications in today’s fast paced, complex digital age with a structured pathway to a solution.

It is highly likely that the application landscape of a company will have been developed over many years. The environment has increased in complexity as applications have been added to provide additional business functionality. As a general rule, the older the application is, the greater the operational risk, and cost of support.

In this fast-paced digital age, businesses need to have an agile IT operations model so the IT department needs to be able to provide support to the business in a timely, cost-efficient manner. Over time, the growth of the IT landscape can constrain the way IT support is provided such that it may be seen as somewhat cumbersome. In this instance, it can easily lead to an operational cost model that strays out of line with the business requirements.

According to a TechCommunity Blog: “Every large evolving IT application landscape has extensive business-critical applications that have been developed individually over the span of many years. Their ability to withstand the future must be put to the test. These customized core applications may implement core processes or manage huge streams of financial data at organizations in the public and private sector. Any failure on their part would cause colossal financial damage to the company and/or irreparably harm its image.”

Senior IT and business managers face a constant challenge to ensure that their IT landscape is “Fit for Purpose!”
Is a lack functionality from their application landscape restricting the business from exploring business opportunities?

Is the operational run cost disproportionate to the business benefit/revenue generated, for example? Do system changes take too long to implement?

Businesses face serious challenges as systems are constantly added to the landscape which then leads to overlapping or duplicate functionality. The IT team needs to check that the data within the system landscape is accurate and there is integrity between systems.

What is the level & impact of data duplication across their systems landscape?

Assess whether systems are running on supported infrastructure, (Hardware, Operating System, Database, Application Source Code, Vendor Supported Version).

The question the CIO or IT Leader needs to ask is: “What opportunities are now available that would ideally change the way that the landscape was designed e.g. is there a manual data entry function that could be replaced by a data interface, or are there application functions that could be replaced by automation?”

The answer? An Application Landscape or specific system review to assess the current level of support risk with the current landscape and identify the symptoms to help plan for reducing this risk within a Business/IT framework.

Some of the main symptoms impacting the support of a systems landscape which would be checked during a systems reviews are as follows:

● Increase in the number of applications due to: Company Mergers & Acquisitions and Natural Landscape Growth
● Support Budget increasing year on year: Business demands for a reduction in the IT Budget
● Data Duplication across databases and applications
● Old Applications reaching end of life
● Functional Duplication across applications
● Complex, costly, unreliable BCP/DR strategy.
● Overly complex application landscape
● Staff shortages due to redundancies or resignations
● Lack of Support knowledge on old applications

In my next blog I will identify the challenges faced by CIOs and IT leaders.