International Business Machines Corporation
Quality-based automated application-portfolio rationalization

Abstract:

An automated portfolio-rationalization module of an application-portfolio management system selects and applies a set of consolidation decisions in order to reduce complexity of and maximize return on investment of a portfolio of software applications. The system identifies consolidation decisions for each application based on that application's technical quality and business quality and computes the cost to apply each decision. The system then organizes nonconflicting subsets of these decisions into opportunities, where each opportunity contains a set of triplets that each identifies one of the decisions and its associated cost. Non-conflicting subsets of these opportunities are further combined into feasible opportunity sets. The system compares the returns on investment that would be generated by applying each of these opportunity sets to the portfolio. The set that would produce a globally or locally maximum return is then implemented by applying the set's application-decommissioning, enhancement, and modernization decisions to the portfolio.