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Application Portfolio

Purpose

The portfolio-level view of every application in the portfolio: how complete the assessment data is, how applications distribute across classification and criticality, and where the gaps are. Use it to see whether the portfolio is ready for rationalisation decisions before trying to make them. The screen is headed Application Portfolio Dashboard, and its subtitle reads: "TIME classification analysis, investment tracking, lifecycle planning, and migration readiness."

Where to find it

Assess → Application Portfolio

What you see

Tabs

  • Overview: the cards Total Applications ("In portfolio"), Total Annual TCO ("Annual spend"), TIME Classified (a count, with "N% coverage") and Unmapped to BCM ("N% unmapped"), and the charts TIME Classification, Lifecycle Phase, Annual TCO by Business Unit, Criticality vs TIME and Assessment Coverage.
  • TIME Analysis: the TIME Bubble Chart - Business Value vs Technical Value, with a Labels toggle and Colour by: (Lifecycle Phase, Criticality or Migration Status). The on-screen guidance reads: "Is this worth continuing to fund? Business value against technical fit, bubble sized by annual TCO. Compare with Portfolio Analysis, which asks whether an application does its job well."
  • Investment: the charts Investment by Business Unit, Top 20 Apps by TCO, Cost Composition, Annual Spend by Vendor and Spend by TIME Classification. Cost Composition splits cost into Licence, Infrastructure, Support and People, and shows a generated sentence of the form "Licence is N% of £N annual run-rate (£N)."
  • Lifecycle: the Application Lifecycle Timeline.
  • Portfolio Analysis: the Application Portfolio Analysis chart, with a Labels toggle and Colour by: (Criticality, Lifecycle Phase or Migration Status). The on-screen guidance reads: "Does it do the job, and is it well built? Functional fit against technical fit, bubble sized by business criticality. Compare with TIME Analysis, which asks whether an application is worth continuing to fund."

The screen has no grid and no forms.

Values

  • TIME Classification: Tolerate, Invest, Migrate or Eliminate. The charts also show Unclassified.
  • Lifecycle Phase: Plan, Phase In, Active, Phase Out or End of Life. The charts also show Unknown.

Overview

Rationalisation decisions rest on assessment data, and assessment data is almost never complete at the point someone wants to make those decisions. This dashboard exists to make that gap visible rather than discovering it halfway through a steering meeting.

It reports the total application count (Total Applications) alongside the number with a TIME classification recorded (TIME Classified, with its percentage coverage) and the number with no business capability (Unmapped to BCM). The difference between those numbers is the work outstanding.

The question this view asks is a funding question, not a technical one

Is this application worth continuing to fund? That is deliberately not the same as asking whether it is well built, because an application can be perfectly well engineered and still not earn its place in the estate. The Portfolio Analysis tab asks the second question.

When to use this

  • At the start of an assessment, to establish the baseline of what is known.
  • Weekly during assessment, to track how quickly the gaps are closing.
  • Before a rationalisation workshop, since deciding the fate of applications whose data is largely blank produces decisions that get revisited.

Key features

TIME classification is a decision you record, not one Clarity Transform calculates

time_classification holds four values: Tolerate, Invest, Migrate and Eliminate. Clarity does not derive it from the scores. It surfaces the inputs (business value, functional fit, technology fit, cost, lifecycle) and records the judgement a human makes.

Two bubble charts, two questions

The TIME Analysis and Portfolio Analysis tabs each draw a bubble chart, and they answer different questions.

  • TIME Bubble Chart - Business Value vs Technical Value (TIME Analysis) plots business value against technical fit, with every bubble sized by annual total cost of ownership. It asks whether an application is worth continuing to fund.
  • Application Portfolio Analysis (Portfolio Analysis) plots functional fit against technical fit, with every bubble sized by business criticality. It asks whether an application does its job and is well built.

The TIME bubble chart plots Business Value (across, 0 to 10) against Technology Fit (up, 0 to 10) and divides the estate into four quadrants, split at 5 and labelled ELIMINATE (low value, low fit), TOLERATE (low value, high fit), MIGRATE (high value, low fit) and INVEST (high value, high fit). Each one implies a different treatment:

Quadrant What it indicates Usual disposition
Invest High value, good fit Performing well and aligned to the target direction Rehost. These are the applications the business notices
Migrate High value, poor fit The business depends on it; the technology does not suit the target The strongest case for Replatform, Refactor or Repurchase
Tolerate Low value, good fit Cheap to keep, easy to move, delivering little Rehost with minimal effort, or Repurchase by consolidating into something else
Eliminate Low value, poor fit Costly, misaligned and delivering little Retire

Sizing by cost is what turns the quadrant into a priority order

Two applications in the same quadrant are not equally urgent if one costs twenty times what the other does. Cost is also usually the argument that carries a retirement decision through a business stakeholder review, which is why the bubbles are sized by total cost of ownership rather than drawn uniformly.

Where the assessment data comes from

What discovery cannot see has to come from the business, and knowing which is which is what makes an assessment plan realistic.

Source What it provides
From discovery Platform, operating system, database and middleware versions; compute, memory and storage allocation and observed utilisation; dependency relationships; container and virtualisation topology
From the business Business value, criticality, ownership and TIME classification. None of these can be discovered from infrastructure. They are captured through structured application owner conversations recorded against the application, so every score has an attributable source and a disposition can be defended later
From the customer, up front Cost data per application at whatever accuracy is available; access to application owners; and agreement on what business value and technology fit mean for this organisation, confirmed before scoring begins rather than debated afterwards

Why the four views are read together

Assess has four views because each one is capable of recommending the wrong thing on its own.

  • Application Portfolio will happily support retaining an application the business values, even where the technology underneath it goes out of support within the year.
  • Technology Portfolio shows what is running out of time, without saying whether the application on top of it is worth keeping.
  • Business Capability Map identifies three applications serving one capability without indicating which of the three should survive. That is a value and cost judgement.
  • Application Landscape shows that two applications must move together, without saying whether either deserves to move at all.

Taken together they converge on decisions that hold up under challenge. An application that scores low on value, sits on an obsolete stack, duplicates a capability another application already serves and carries no downstream dependencies is not a judgement call. It is a retirement, and the evidence for it is on the page. That is the standard rationalisation should be held to, because these decisions are eventually defended to a business owner who does not want to lose their application.

How to

Check the portfolio before rationalising

  1. Open the dashboard. Go to Assess → Application Portfolio. The Overview tab shows the cards above its charts.
  2. Read the completeness figures first. Compare Total Applications against TIME Classified, which shows the number classified and its "N% coverage". That ratio tells you how much of the portfolio has actually been assessed, as opposed to merely being listed.
  3. Work the unmapped set. Applications counted in Unmapped to BCM have no business capability. Until that count is low, treat the Business Capability Map as incomplete for a leadership conversation.
  4. Move to Rationalise for the detail. This view shows the shape of the portfolio. Recording the disposition per application is done in Rationalise, which offers inline editing of Scope and Transformation Plan. The other assessment fields are application columns in the CMDB.

Important fields

The charts are built from these Application columns: Time Classification, Time Rationale, Time Review Date, Business Value, Technology Fit, Functional Fit, Lifecycle Phase, the lifecycle dates (Start Phase In, Start Active, Start Phase Out, End Phase Out, End Of Life), Vendor Support End Date, the annual licence, infrastructure, support and people costs, Fte Count, and Business Capability L1 to L3.

Card Description
Total Applications Applications in the portfolio.
Total Annual TCO The annual spend across the portfolio.
TIME Classified The number of applications with a TIME classification recorded, with the percentage coverage underneath.
Unmapped to BCM Applications with no business capability assigned, with the percentage unmapped underneath.

Tips & best practices

Completeness before analysis

A portfolio where a third of applications have no classification will produce a rationalisation plan covering two thirds of the estate. That is not a plan.

Common mistakes

Reading the distribution charts before the completeness figures

A distribution built on partial data looks authoritative and is not. If only half the portfolio is classified, the classification breakdown describes that half, not the estate. Always read completeness first and treat the distributions as provisional until it is high.