Information Technology — Technology Infrastructure and Application Portfolio Inventory
Client Business Issues:
The information technology division of a leading retail organization needed assistance with the review and documentation of their technology operating environment, including a current state analysis of their technology infrastructure and business software application portfolio. The overall goal of this effort was reduce costs and promote simplification through the elimination of duplicate, competing, out-of-date, and/or unused technologies.
Our Approach:
Arc Partners assigned senior staff to partner with the client’s team to complete the project. The combined team’s initial focus was on the development of two reference models, 0ne model to support the retail business organization and a second to support the technology infrastructure. The team conducted facilitated workshops with technology service area owners to identify specific information supporting in-service technologies (hardware and software) including:
- Technology classification (within the defined reference model), role, and status
- Product source and version
- Platform and owner
- Future release/retirement/obsolesce schedule
Similar facilitated sessions were also held with business software owners to identify:
- Application classification with Domain and Family (as identified in the defined reference model)
- Descriptive information including source, number of users, and version
- IT and business owners
- Supporting technology and manpower requirements
- Current interface information, and
- Future planed releases
The completion of this project included the analysis of the documented findings and the development of Technology Simplification Recommendations. Within our summarized findings we evaluated simplification impact, implementation cost and complexity, next steps, and dependencies.
Value Received By Client:
Using the results of our work the client was able to achieve immediate payback by focusing IT simplification efforts and resources on those high savings, low (implementation) complexity initiatives. Additionally, the projects documentation supported better coordination and communications between the various technology areas.