Understanding Application Landscape: the Challenge

As an article in CIO Magazine explains: “CIOs at traditional businesses have typically been the guardians of an organization’s technology. Weighing in on which applications will improve specific business tasks and reporting the anticipated value of technology to senior management.

“In this role, the CIO was first answering the question, “Do we need it?” As their role evolved, they’d take requests from business leaders and solve the technology problem and the question became, “How do we do it?” Now they must take the reins at a higher level by shepherding business strategy and answering the most important question about any company’s future, “What is it we need to do?”

“CIOs need to immerse themselves in their company's business and become the visionaries that see the business through the lens of a digital mindset. These CIOs will become indispensable to their organizations and by virtue of their unique understanding of technology and its business applications, become the next CEOs in a global digital marketplace.”

In this fast-changing world of IT and the drive to improve IT efficiency, some of the issues facing Heads of IT & CIO’s:-

- Unable to remove old applications and/or databases
- No longer have resources who understand applications
- Unable to maintain applications and databases
- Applications and databases are out of support
- Backlog of application enhancement requests
- Regulatory changes backlog
- Regular Interfaces or Application failures
- Unable to provide DR/BCP system recovery time in line with business requirements
- Need to take on TOM initiatives e.g. SDC
- Out of date or lack of documentation to support regulatory requirements
- Business requirement to reduce the IT Budget

In this environment, the requirement for a 5-year landscape upgrade plan is crucial to successfully implement change whilst delivering a stable and well supported IT systems landscape. The Plan needs to address three distinct areas, each that will have an impact on the other.

These are:

1. Business Review
2 Technical Review and
3. Operations Review.

I will cover these three areas in my next blog on the application landscape.