Enterprise Portfolio Rationalization for portfolio analysis and management

New regulatory measures today demand major changes in the applications supporting businesses. The problem is compounded by continual technology obsolescence.

Over time, these changes in operational processes and application software have a cumulative impact on the entire environment, creating imbalances and inefficiencies in the technology and operations arena. The time required to deliver enhancements spirals upward as the applications become more and more disjointed. As a result, greater manpower is required at operations level to handle manual steps. A higher portion of technology budget is consumed by maintenance activities, leaving a shrinking budgetary share for supporting new business initiatives.

Enterprise Portfolio Rationalization

Enterprise Portfolio Rationalization (EPR) is a portfolio analysis and optimization (Bold) methodology created by ITC Infotech. EPR is competent to analyze, strategize and categorize the changes that are needed to periodically realign the operations and technology facets with business goals. EPR also introduces approaches to extend the period between these realignments.

EPR exercise

EPR facilitates a holistic impact analysis of strategic business initiatives. It validates and incorporates such projects into the optimal execution roadmap. The exercise explores the entire environment from two primary perspectives: as the business process and application portfolio (with a focus on business environment and goals as delivered by operations and technology) and as the technology infrastructure footprint (with a focus on core technology products facilitating business users’ access to the business environment).

Deliverables of the EPR exercise include, but are not limited to, the following:

	Identify underutilized, redundant and obsolete processes and applications
	Identify consolidation opportunities in the infrastructure arena to optimize the footprint
	Deliver a multi-year roadmap for interdependent projects to implement the identified changes, factoring in the business priorities and operational/technology dependencies
	Reduce manual effort and maintenance costs for better investment decisions

A complete EPR exercise takes 6-8 weeks of elapsed time, a fairly short timeframe to achieve the start of a long and fruitful journey of technology management.