Because running applications usually constitute the largest part of IT spending, application portfolio governance is crucial to containing costs and to ensuring that the IT support to the business is consistent and reliable. Alfabet FastLane allows you to evaluate and analyze applications in the context of various application portfolios in order to understand the technical and information architectures relevant to the applications, the use of the applications by the business as well as application costs, failure rates, and risks. The assessment of applications and application portfolios allows you to understand the usage, performance, and criticality of an application in the IT landscape. Attaining answers to the following questions is critical to the maintenance of a healthy and cost-effective architecture as well as planning future operating models:

• Which applications should be retired?
• Which applications should be invested in?
• Which applications can be consolidated or optimized?
• Which applications are to be tolerated in the landscape but need observation?
• Which applications have risks that should be mitigated?
• Which applications need to have their lifecycles extended or reduced?

The assessment of the portfolio requires that applications are bundled into application groups that logically structure the applications to be assessed. The evaluation occurs based on preconfigured indicators used to evaluate the applications as well as analytics and business questions. The choice of KPIs and analytics will depend on the goals for the portfolio assessment. For example, if the goal is to reduce the number of applications in the IT landscape, then it is necessary to understand how much an application is used in the business and the amount of overlap there is between applications.