Developing an Enterprise Specific Application Portfolio Assessment Method: From Architectural Principles to Measures

This paper presents a method for assessing an application portfolio. The method has two levels, starting with architectural principles, i.e. rules that define and motivate what IT related decisions can be made within an enterprise. In the assessment the principles constitute the foundation for making decisions on which applications to retain, modify or phase out. In the second step the architectural principles are decomposed into high-level measures that are based on more detailed measures. The measures are used to examine the compliance between the architectural principles and the application. The presented assessment method is time-efficient and presents the assessment in an easy-to-grasp tree-structure. The method has been validated by experts and an assessment of one application has been carried out at Scania in order to validate the method. Scania is a large multinational vehicle manufacturer