By Leslie Robinet – Corporate Services Director – MEGA International
Application inventory, or Application Portfolio Management (APM), when viewed as an objective, can feel like a glass ceiling, standing in the way of the true digital transformation of the entire organization. However, by treating it instead as a simple first step, it constitutes a strong foundation for driving transformation projects that are both smooth and effective. Most importantly, it helps dismantle preconceived notions about Enterprise Architecture (EA).
Expand the Scope: Application Inventory Is Only the First Step in Transformation
Application Portfolio Management (APM) inventories and maps an organization’s applications to assess their value, cost, risks, and performance, while also optimizing the portfolio by addressing redundancy, lifecycle, obsolescence, and value. This technical approach can be further enhanced by integrating business capabilities, processes, risks, and data into a shared repository.
The goal is to gain a comprehensive view of the organization, break down silos, optimize costs, improve efficiency, and focus efforts on projects that align most closely with the overall strategy. This includes developing scenarios to analyze potential impacts.
While useful, this approach can become overly complex without a clear use-case framework. A use-case model helps address the right questions for projects: business challenges, levers for action, and current and future issues.
Depending on the organization, initial use cases might include rationalizing the application portfolio to reduce costs, migrating to the cloud, digitizing processes, strengthening security, sustaining business processes, or ensuring regulatory compliance.
Expanding the scope of APM is ultimately about creating value: improving data governance, enhancing the quality and evolution of business processes, better architecting solutions, and defining development projects. It also involves strengthening risk management and correlating these efforts with current challenges, all while leveraging existing information.
Business-IT Collaboration: The Key to Successful Digital Transformation
In “digital transformation,” the key term is “transformation”—specifically, the transformation of business operations. The approach must be collaborative between the IT department (for the digital aspect) and the business departments, who are the true drivers of transformation. The more numerous and informed the business contributors are, the more the initiative evolves from being just an IT project into a larger company project.
This phase involves restructuring the application inventory by incorporating feedback from contributors and key users, considering factors such as criticality, perceived value, and coverage of functional needs. It’s essential not to overwhelm users with too much information. Each group should only receive what is relevant to their roles, without placing extra burdens on them.
Deliverables like dashboards help embody and promote the initiative by demonstrating how each project addresses initial challenges and key success factors. These results should be shared beyond the project’s initial stakeholders to “socialize” the initiative across the entire organization.
As a democratized communication tool, the intranet portal provides visibility and supports impact analysis—from business to technical aspects, and from strategy to execution. It highlights the contributions of individuals while fostering an understanding of the broader organizational context, beyond immediate silos, through clear and accessible language.
Model to anticipate future transformations
The third pillar of this method is anticipating the future. To do so, gaining a wider perspective using existing elements is essential. This is particularly true for the shared repository, which provides a comprehensive view of the system—IT, business processes, data, risks, and more.
This allows the organization to prepare for future challenges at all levels, without being confined to the present. By leveraging a shared foundation—such as IT and business capability maps, a unified vision of the organization’s purpose—it becomes easier to anticipate changes, seize opportunities, and strengthen the company’s resilience.
This groundwork simplifies complex realities, making it easier to understand and take action. While digital tools have made modeling less common, it still plays a crucial role due to its ability to communicate clearly and effectively through visuals.
Predictive AI, data visualization, and data analysis tools aid in developing scenarios and guiding decision-making, but the human element remains irreplaceable: creating a model of the future is a creative act that cannot be automated.
In conclusion, while the initial approach should be gradual, every element of expanding the scope, scale (cross-functional), and perspective (modeling) supports the others in synergy. This approach equips the organization with the ability to grow and remain strong over the long term, embodying a truly connected enterprise architecture, aligned with its purpose and more resilient and efficient.
Of American origin, Leslie Robinet graduated from Virginia Tech with a major in Industrial Systems Engineering. After working in the US in process optimization with a Lean approach, she settled in France in 2005 and joined MEGA International to accompany different clients in their Enterprise Architecture projects. She evolved from a Solution Engineer to Project Manager, then was responsible for Professional Services for the francophone, and German territories. Now, as Corporate Services Director, she mobilizes with all regions, to improve methods, processes, offers and skills, for a better customer experience of services. Member of MEGA’s CSR Committee since 2022, she is CSR Ambassador since 2023. In parallel, she is one of the founders of the association « Mon Epice’Rit », a cooperative grocery based on the principles of participation, ecology, and solidarity.