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Application Portfolio Management Foundations for Healthcare Organizations

Manage your applications to maximize organizational value.

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  • Organizations consider application oversight a low priority and app portfolio knowledge is poor.
  • There is no dedicated or centralized effort to manage your application portfolio so there is no single source of truth supporting and informing decision making.
  • Organizations acquire more applications over time, creating redundancy, waste, and the need for additional support.
  • Organizations are more vulnerable to changing markets, balanced against internal and external pressures.
  • Flexibility and the ability to scale are compromised when applications are unadaptable or cannot scale.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

You can’t outsource strategy.

  • Modern software options have decreased the need for organizations to have robust in-house application management capabilities. Your applications’ future and governance of the portfolio still require a centralized IT oversight to ensure the best return on investment.

Impact and Result

  • Think low priority over no priority.
  • Integrate these tasks into your mixed workload.
  • Create an inventory built for better decision making.
  • Rationalize your apps in accordance with business priorities and communicate risks on their terms.
  • Create a roadmap that improves communication between those who own, manage, and support an application.
  • Build your APM process fit for size.

Application Portfolio Management Foundations for Healthcare Organizations Research & Tools

1. Application Portfolio Management Foundations for Healthcare Organizations – This blueprint will help you build a streamlined application portfolio management process.

APM establishes a program and record of applications used in your organization, an assessment of how well they are supporting their core functions, and guidance on where modernization efforts are needed. The dashboards help support conversations and improve IT planning and product management.

2. Application Portfolio Management Foundations Playbook – A template that builds your application portfolio management playbook.

Capture your APM roles and responsibilities and build a repeatable process.

3. Application Portfolio Management Snapshot and Foundations Tool – This tool is the central hub for the majority of the activities within Application Portfolio Management Foundations.

It can store application information, execute rationalization, and build a portfolio roadmap your applications.

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Member Testimonials

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St. Lukes Health System Ltd.

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Hans added clarity to APM/SAM that we really needed. Well worth the hour call. Thanks!


Application Portfolio Management Foundations for Healthcare Organizations

Manage your applications to maximize organizational value.

Analyst Perspective

You can't outsource accountability.

Vincent Mirabelli

Many organizations lack full visibility into their overall application portfolio, opting rather to focus on individual projects or application development. Inevitably, application sprawl creates process and data disparities, redundant applications, and duplication of resources and stands as a significant barrier to business agility and responsiveness. The shift from strategic investment to application maintenance creates an unnecessary constraint on innovation and value delivery. And in healthcare, there are already enough constraints as it is.

IT has an increasing need to discover and support all applications in the organization. Unmanaged and unsanctioned applications can lead to increased reputational risk. What you don't know will hurt you.

You can outsource development, you can even outsource maintenance, but you cannot, and should not, outsource accountability for the application portfolio. Organizations need a holistic dashboard of application performance and dispositions to help guide and inform planning and investment discussions.

Application portfolio management (APM) can't tell you why something is broken or how to fix it, but it is an important tool to determine if an application's value and performance are up to your standards and can help meet your future goals.

Vincent Mirabelli

Principal Research Director, Applications Delivery and Management
Info-Tech Research Group

Is this research right for you?

Research Navigation

Managing your application portfolio is essential regardless of its size or whether your software is purchased or developed in-house. Every healthcare organization must have some degree of application portfolio management (APM) to ensure that applications deliver value efficiently, and that their risk of gradual decline in technical health is appropriately limited.

Your APM goals

If this describes your primary goal(s)

  • We are building a business case to determine where and if APM is needed now.
  • We want to understand how well supported are our business capabilities, departments, or core functions by our current applications.
  • We want to start our APM program with our core or critical applications.
  • We want to build our APM inventory for less than 150 applications (division, department, operating unit, government, small enterprise, etc.).
  • Optionally, start with Application Portfolio Snapshot for capability mapping and analysis.
  • Start with Application Portfolio Management Foundations for Healthcare Organizations (this blueprint).
  • We want to start simple with a quick win for our 150 most important applications.
  • We want to start with an APM pilot before committing to an enterprise APM program.
  • We need to rationalize potentially redundant and underperforming applications to determine which to keep, replace, or retire.
  • We want to start enterprise APM, with up to 150 critical applications.
  • We want to collect and analyze detailed information about our applications.
  • We need tools to help us calculate total cost of ownership (TCO) and value.
  • We want to customize our APM journey and rationalization.
  • We want to build a formal communication strategy for our APM program.

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

  • Organizations consider application oversight a low priority and app portfolio knowledge is poor.
  • There is no dedicated or centralized effort to manage your application portfolio, so there is no single source of truth supporting and informing decision making.
  • Organizations acquire more applications over time, creating redundancy, waste, and the need for additional support.
  • Organizations are more vulnerable to changing markets, balanced against internal and external pressures. Flexibility and the ability to scale are compromised when applications are unadaptable or cannot scale.

Common Obstacles

  • Application portfolio management (APM) implies taking a holistic approach and compiling multiple priorities and perspectives.
  • Organizations have limited time to act strategically or proactively and need to be succinct.
  • Uncertainties on business value prevent IT from successfully advising software decision making.
  • IT knows it has significant technical debt but struggles to get the business to act on technical risks.
  • Attempts at exposing these problems rarely gain buy-in and discourage the push for improvement.

Info-Tech's Approach

  • Think low priority over no priority.
  • Integrate these tasks into your mixed workload.
  • Create an inventory built for better decision making.
  • Rationalize your apps in accordance with business priorities and communicate risks on their terms.
  • Create a roadmap that improves communication between those who own, manage, and support an application.
  • Build your APM process fit for size.

Info-Tech Insight: You can't outsource strategy.

Modern software options have decreased the need for organizations to have robust in-house application management capabilities. Your applications' future and governance of the portfolio still require a centralized IT oversight to ensure the best return on investment.

Growth and innovation are constrained by poor application management

Having more applications than an organization needs means unnecessarily high costs and additional burden on the teams who support the applications. This is often the result of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity. In the context of healthcare organizations, where costs continue to rise and profit margins are shrinking, this is added pressure the IT team cannot afford.

A poorly maintained portfolio will eventually hurt the business more than it hurts IT.

Legacy systems, complex environments, or anything that leads to a portfolio that can't adapt to changing business needs will eventually become a barrier to growing the business and accomplishing objectives.

And the blame generally falls on the IT department.

70%

of IT budget (within healthcare organizations) is allocated to supporting existing applications.

Source: Galen Health Solutions, n.d.

A hidden and inefficient application portfolio is the root cause of so many pains experienced by both IT and the business.

  • Demand/Capacity Imbalance
  • Overspending
  • Security and Business Continuity Risk
  • Delays in Delivery
  • Barriers to Growth

The unique challenges of healthcare organizations

In the context of APM, healthcare organizations face many unique challenges not often shared outside their industry.

The prevalence of legacy systems

Legacy IT infrastructure can be difficult to manage and maintain, expensive to upgrade, and an attack vector for cyber threats. Integrating them with newer technologies can be a challenge and thus, not always an option.

A complex regulatory environment

Healthcare organizations must comply with a range of regulations, such as HIPAA, which constrain or hamper their ability to adopt new technologies and change existing systems.

Patient privacy

Protecting patient privacy is a top priority in the healthcare sector. Ensuring that sensitive patient information is encrypted (at rest, in motion, and often while in use), stored, and processed securely is a major challenge.

Interoperability

Healthcare organizations often use multiple systems from different vendors. Ensuring that these systems can exchange information and work together seamlessly is always challenging. Vendors are moving away from interfaces toward APIs and the new FHIR standard, complicating application rationalization.

Playing at the high stakes tables

In healthcare, a failure in IT systems can have serious consequences, up to and including the loss of life and/or compromise of sensitive patient data.

Resourcing constraints

There are often budget and staffing constraints. This makes it difficult to dedicate the resources needed for APM when there are more immediate challenges.

The ever-evolving technology landscape

The healthcare technology landscape is constantly evolving, and healthcare organizations need to keep up with the latest developments. That means making decisions about which technologies to adopt and which to retire.

Complicated by data storage and/or conversion requirements

Different jurisdictions mean different regulations, and M&A activity often results in a long tail of clinical integration.

APM comes at a justified cost

APM increases motivation and decreases operation costs.

The benefits of APM

APM identifies areas where you can reduce core spending and reinvest in innovation initiatives.

Other benefits can include:

  • Fewer redundancies
  • Less risk
  • Less complexity
  • Improved processes
  • Flexibility
  • Scalability
Start by understanding your application landscape and performance. Use APM Foundations to connect and update your application department orientation.

APM allows you to better understand and set the direction of your portfolio

Application Inventory

The artifact that documents and informs the business of your application portfolio.

Application Rationalization

The process of collecting information and assessing your applications to determine recommended dispositions.

Application Alignment

The process of revealing application information through interviewing stakeholders and aligning to business capabilities.

Application Roadmap

The artifact that showcases the strategic directions for your applications over a given timeline.

Application portfolio management:

The ongoing practice of:

  • Providing visibility into applications across the organization.
  • Recommending corrections or enhancements to decision makers.
  • Aligning delivery teams on priority.
  • Showcasing the direction of applications to stakeholders.

Every organization experiences some degree of application sprawl

Causes of Sprawl

  • Poor Lifecycle Management
  • Turnover & Lack of Knowledge Transfer
  • Siloed Business Units & Decentralized IT
  • Business-Managed IT (Shadow IT)
  • Mergers & Acquisitions

Problems With Sprawl

  • Redundancy and Inefficient Spending
  • Disparate Apps & Data
  • Obsolescence
  • Difficulties in Prioritizing Support
  • Barriers to Change & Growth

Application sprawl:

Inefficiencies within your application portfolio are created by the gradual and nonstrategic accumulation of applications.

You have more apps than you need.

Only 34% of software is rated as both important and effective by users across all industries and sectors.

34%

Source: Info-Tech's CIO Business Vision

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About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

MEMBER RATING

10.0/10
Overall Impact

10
Average Days Saved

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve.

Read what our members are saying

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst

Get the help you need in this 4-phase advisory process. You'll receive 5 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.

Guided Implementation 1: Lay your foundations
  • Call 1: Establish goals and foundations for your APM practice.

Guided Implementation 2: Improve your inventory
  • Call 1: Initiate inventory and determine data requirements.

Guided Implementation 3: Rationalize your applications
  • Call 1: Initiate rationalization with group of applications.
  • Call 2: Review result of first iteration and perform retrospective.

Guided Implementation 4: Populate your roadmap
  • Call 1: Initiate your roadmap and determine your ongoing APM practice.

Authors

Vince Mirabelli

Hans Eckman

Ben Mackle

Contributors

3 anonymous contributors

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