Rationalize your Applications in a smart way using an Application Diagram

About Smart Application Rationalization using an Application Landscape Diagram

Smart application rationalization often takes four steps: identification, classification, evaluation, and advice. And these steps will lead to deduplication of functionality, losing redundancy and controlling your application portfolio budget.

In all these 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 are we talking about.

• A landscape diagram tells what apps have been identified and what groups of apps may not have been identified and numbered yet.

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

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

• A landscape diagram shows the dependency of processes on apps: what apps are the key ones that all work in the organization heavily depends upon.

Considering all this there is no reason at all not to have or 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 relating to them and next you create a view on top of your model, filtering out or in the data you want to see on 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.