Column: Software


How to Marie Kondo your application portfolio


By Marc Zottner, Field CTO, VMware Tanzu


time-bound (for the duration of the next four-six weeks), ambitious. For each objective then set key results to define achievement, quantitative and measurable. Many times on modernisation projects, too much effort and time are spent making inconsequential technology changes rather than focusing on business outcomes.


Tidy by category and in order Te order in which you tidy is the “secret sauce” of the Kondo method. Successful app portfolio rationalisation projects adopt very similar principles. Follow a highly- structured and well-defined approach to portfolio transformation, whilst saving room for agility and small iterations. Categorise similar applications to streamline the task of building a strategy and recommended disposition (retain, replace, re-host, re-factor, re-platform, re-build), target abstraction layer (IaaS, CaaS, PaaS, SaaS), and a landing zone – public, private, hybrid, multi-cloud. Numerous factors like architecture,


B


eing stuck at home this past year has led many to tidy up their homes and lives. It has become such a pastime, to the point of becoming a verb – Marie Kondo’s ‘Magic


Cleaning’ – a strategy of clearing out waste, but also of rethinking our lifestyles. But, what if Marie Kondo’s wisdom applies to a virtual application portfolio at enterprise scale? Te Marie Kondo philosophy of tidying


little by little is also applicable to cleaning an application portfolio. Start small, iterate quickly, and do not try to address everything at once. Modernisation projects can take years to complete for thousands of apps, so it is essential to pace yourself and remember to plan your pathway starting with the end.


Visualising the end from the beginning Modernising a large portfolio can be daunting, achieving no meaningful return on investment in terms of business outcomes if not framed properly early in the process. Rope in other members of the business too, rather than taking an IT-centric focus. At VMware Tanzu, the KonMari


philosophy is rendered through the lens of five Ss:


It is important to set clear objectives and key results from the beginning


1. Savings – made across the entire company’s IT landscape; look for areas of cost avoidance and reduction as well as synergies between departments. 2. Stability – does the application need increased reliability, resilience and quality? 3. Scaleability – how valuable is it to scale up or down, depending on your requirements? Is there a cloud service you can rely on for capacity increases? 4. Security – a comprehensive security posture that includes proactive and fast mitigation. 5. Speed – giving developers more time to code, bringing improvements in production faster, and creating highly-efficient and automated operational processes. It is important to set clear objectives and


key results from the beginning and use those to drive and measure success. First, define what the objectives are: qualitative,


language, business criticality, size and lifecycle should be taken into consideration when grouping applications into “buckets”. From there, analyse the potential business rewards apps bring and the technical difficulty to get there. Both perspectives are then combined into a two-by-two matrix – “magic quadrant” – to make informed decisions on what to do (disposition) with which groups of applications. Te matrix is a simple square divided into four equal quadrants. One axis represents business rewards, the other technical readiness. Low-hanging fruit with high potential, for example, are the applications in the quadrant with high business potential and low modernisation effort.


Unleashing your potential Just like cleaning house, modernising apps should not be done from scratch every year. Consistent iterations, categorised approaches and starting with the end in mind all help to deliver a much more comprehensive app-modernisation program that even Marie Kondo would be proud of. If you are serious about accelerating your move to digital, no-one else is better placed to own your portfolio clean-up and transformation strategy than yourself.


www.electronicsworld.co.uk May 2021 19


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