Application portfolio management: a decision-oriented view of enterprise architecture

Today large companies operate 100s of computer-based information systems (IS), also called applications, to support their businesses. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is regarded as a promising concept to cope with the complexity caused by large application portfolios (AP). This article focuses on senior IT managers’ decision-making with regard to their AP, and EA’s role therein. Through multiple case studies in large companies, we found that these managers consider and balance a set of aspects, each of which is supported by partial EA models maintained by specific groups within their IT departments. These models are, however, not sufficiently integrated. Based on the empirical findings, we propose indicators for each of the partial EA models to aggregate the AP-relevant characteristics per application, which are then integrated into an AP dashboard to support senior IT managers’ holistic AP management. Consequently, a decision-oriented view is created of the overall EA, which the managers of the case studies companies deemed to be very helpful for steering their AP.