How to Tackle Your App Portfolio Modernization Strategy

IT teams face a growing web of complexity in their application portfolios. These portfolios are ever-changing and often include in-house custom apps, new apps added through acquisitions, or commercial off-the-shelf software. IT teams also face an added layer of complexity when people move between teams or when coworkers leave the company, making it challenging to identify the primary app owner. With constantly changing business needs and organizational changes, it is easy to lose track of what’s in your application portfolio.

Executing on app portfolio modernization requires people with expertise, time and money, so it’s important to make that investment strategically. IT teams need a strategic decision-making framework, automated tools and low-touch analysis to accelerate their digital transformation journey and make smarter decisions about applications.

One of the myths of app portfolio modernization is that an organization cannot begin to modernize until it understands every part of its app portfolio. Luckily, teams can use lean and agile methodologies to short-circuit this analysis paralysis, leveraging iterative feedback loops and frequent delivery to validate progress, move faster and produce higher quality, consistent outcomes. To help organizations kickstart the app portfolio modernization process or breathe life into ongoing initiatives that are stagnant, VMware developed an approach called VMware App Navigator.

So, what does app modernization look like in the real world? Using our own IT organization as an example, our IT app portfolio has grown exponentially in size and complexity over the last two decades through custom and third-party apps, as well as through acquisitions of companies and technologies. VMware is undergoing a digital transformation to maintain and mature this complex portfolio, and to ensure we can innovate faster and be responsive to our customers’ needs. To efficiently handle change requests for new features, we must accelerate delivery by modernizing mission-critical apps that are still running on legacy systems. This talk shares an example of how our IT team modernized our Customer Connect portal, a monolithic application, to improve the customer experience while achieving a 40% improvement in service response time and saving over 1,000 person-hours in maintenance.

To jumpstart the modernization process, our IT team partnered with the App Navigator team to develop a strategic framework for app modernization that considered key business and technical factors. Our objective was to develop a targeted list of app modernization candidates so we could have a productive starting point for strategic discussions and prioritize our modernization efforts. Our approach to app prioritization follows these four steps:

1. Confirm app inventory: What do we have in our portfolio today?

To evaluate which apps were in scope and candidates for modernization, our IT team needed to first update its app inventory and build a single source of truth. This involved an extensive exercise of culling through its large app inventory to identify in-scope apps, map the correct app owner, determine where the app is deployed, and where the source code sits. This early part of the process allowed us to develop a clean baseline of our application inventory to apply a first-pass filter and determine the apps in our portfolio that would fall under the scope for our modernization effort.

2. Initiate technical discovery: What’s technically feasible to move?

Today’s software teams sit on a rich data set available in their source control systems, and it is important to have an automated and low-touch way to detect legacy frameworks, technical debt and cloud anti-patterns to quickly assess the modernization maturity of the app portfolio. Therefore, our IT team leveraged automated tools like Cloud Suitability Analyzer to analyze source code to detect common cloud anti-patterns. The team used Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu to discover components running on virtual machines (VMs) and their dependencies on services and components outside of the application itself. These tools allowed us to collect data across the portfolio to understand the specific runtime platforms and technology stacks for low-hanging modernization opportunities.  Click on Page 2 to continue reading…