AT#35: How to be Successful with Application Landscape Planning Part 2
We have written many posts at the Architectural Thinking blog that deal with more strategic topics like vision, strategy and business architecture and how to connect this to solution development. The common aim defines the direction the company shall go, based on a vision statement created by executives. After that, business architecture comes into play and make the vision more operational.
In our ->last blog post we discussed how a capability map can be used for strategic application landscape planning by assigning existing applications. Today we show a great way to model how the application landscape shall evolve over the next years. A mid-time view of 3-5 years is important because legacy renovation and introduction of new platforms take its time (this reality cannot be ignored even in the VUCA world).
A great way to visualize this planned evolution of the applications is presented in the following figure. It shows the strategic application landscape planning for the core capabilities of a bank example:
This figure presents the aggregated visualization for top-level executives. It shows the most significant 3-5 applications per business capability only. Each application is visualized by a circle, arrows show how applications evolve, merge with other applications or die. Both, the strategic heat map positioning current applications and the diagram of their strategic evolution are governed by governance boards.
Previous Post:
AT#34: How to be Successful with Application Landscape Planning