Speed and Agility

Introduction

The requirement for organizations to respond swiftly to business and process changes as well as keeping up with changing customer needs is well understood. An agile business responds rapidly to changes in its business environment to gain a competitive edge. Just to stay in business requires swift action in itself. Without business (and corresponding IT) agility, it is impossible to respond effectively to change. Business speed and agility allows you to not only survive, but gives you the competitive edge to win and grow.

An agile or flexible business can:

• build new strategies and implement new offerings quickly and accurately
• fully understand what impact new regulations, processes, and offerings will have on its business model

Speed and agility is crucial. However, many businesses are finding, to their peril, that IT has become one of the most difficult things to adapt to change.

CIO / Executive

Whether you are the market leader in your field, or you are aiming to reach that position, you need to enable your business to respond quickly to changing market pressures and scenarios. Unless your business can fully understand the knock-on effects of making changes, then what could appear as a fast and agile implementation of change could actually manifest itself as risky and harmful to your business.

The key challenge for any CIO is to ensure that IT can respond effectively to any emerging business requirement via a fast and accurate change process that is undertaken on agile IT platforms. This agility would not be possible without having an accurate and precise understanding of the current IT infrastructure and the processes that reside in and around it. Micro Focus helps by automating the discovery and documentation of your current system, allowing you to implement measurements that allow you to see exactly where the system development bottlenecks are, allowing you to plan for a more agile future.  

Forrester agrees that speed and agility are a positive outcome from APM:

“IT management is using application portfolio management (APM) tools to shave 10% to 30% or more from the maintenance budget, achieving ROI within the first 12 months. These savings provide the opportunity to increase innovation capacity by 30% to 95%. ….organizations really can’t afford not to make APM a top priority in the next budgeting cycle...” (footnote 1)

Architect

As a member of the CTO office and IT architecture staff, you will likely be responsible for assessing, reviewing and planning IT platform changes and as such, ensuring that the correct architectural and technical considerations are being met. The ability to understand the entirety of the existing IT landscape has an important bearing on what options are available and how best to accelerate change. The first logical step would be to take an initial audit of that landscape to document and understand exactly what business rules and processes make up the current way of working. Then, within the context of this knowledge, it should be possible for you to review and assess the IT portfolio to determine what could be used, re-used or re-architected to respond to business needs and provide long lasting business agility. Micro Focus solutions allow you to automate this important discovery and documentation process, helping you reach the most effective architecture and design choices in a fast and cost effective manner.

Technical

Since your organization’s business processes are actually defined by the rules within the IT systems, then as a developer, you are actually fine-tuning (or de-tuning) the business every time you make an IT change. Today’s applications can be large and complex, having grown from the maintenance and enhancements that have been made over the years. Micro Focus can help you uncover these rules and determine, with accuracy, the interdependencies that exist, enabling you to make the appropriate changes more rapidly, safe in the knowledge that the effects and impacts on other systems and processes have been fully understood.

Conclusion

Speed and agility are essential business characteristics, enabled by understanding your IT Application Portfolio.

For large companies, it can often be difficult to implement changes to existing applications quickly while controlling cost and risk. A complex array of business process, interdependencies and undocumented usage lies beneath the surface of the IT portfolio list. To plan and implement essential changes based on assumptions, estimates or experiences of specific individuals will not be enough to correctly estimate, plan and change without introducing significant business risk and possibility of delays.

A more scientific approach is required to determine the whole landscape’s current value to the business. APM, as the name suggests, is designed to manage this application portfolio, and promotes speed and agility by taking the guesswork out of the assessment and review of the artifacts that can be taken forward to provide greater business value.

Footnote 1 - "Building the Business Case for APM”, Forrester, October 2005