About Smart Application Rationalization Using an Application Landscape Diagram

Smart application rationalization often takes four steps: identification, classification, evaluation, and advice. These steps will lead to the deduplication of functionality, reduce redundancy, and control your application portfolio budget.

In all four steps, it is a new best practice to create an application landscape diagram (static at A0 size or interactive dynamic online) that gives all the stakeholders a comprehensive overview of what we are talking about.

• A landscape diagram shows which apps have been identified and which groups of apps may not have been identified or numbered yet.

• A landscape diagram shows what apps are apps or should be qualified as services, modules, interfaces, or information systems, etc.

• A landscape diagram gives a quick overview of what apps are ready to be replaced, renewed, etc.

• A landscape diagram shows the dependencies of processes on apps: which apps are the key ones that the organization heavily depends on.

Considering all this, there is no reason not to create an application landscape diagram of the current or future state of your application landscape.

Application Rationalization under control.

Creating an application landscape

On the Dragon1 platform, it is very easy to create diagrams like the one above of your application landscape.

You just import data via an Excel sheet or XML file, or you enter and enrich data manually.

Next, you create a model with your data, then create a view on top of it, filtering in or out the data you want to see in the visualization.

Next, you create a visualization template with visual items (data/shape-placeholders) that place the data that is left in the view with certain shapes, sizes, and colors on your visualization canvas.

To top it off, you can link the visual items to layers and frames and create an animation of your application landscape.

If you by any chance have defined an indicator, you can even highlight or track and trace what is wrong in your landscape or what applications block or enable the execution of your strategy.

Creating a Drill Down Application Landscape

Here is a blog about creating a drill-down application landscape. https://www.dragon1.com/blogs/markpaauwe/generating-drill-down-application-landscapes-on-dragon1

Doing application portfolio analysis yourself

If you are interested in creating an application landscape yourself on Dragon1, you just need to buy a Dragon1 user license here and you are ready to start, supported by our specialist on the service desk.