Applications Advisory Research Center

Whether you build, buy, configure, or customize applications – or all of the above – our Applications Practice's research and advisory services can guide you through all of the challenges of building a world-class applications team that will deliver digital solutions that delight your users and customers.

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1

Start With an Applications Department Strategy
Primary driver of innovation in application delivery

Do you need an introduction to applications strategy? Try this rapid exercise to assess strategic priorities:

Are you ready to get started? There is no such thing as a universal applications department. The first step is to define a strategy tailored to your organization's needs:

Do you want to strengthen your existing application strategy? Use our research to assess its effectiveness and ensure alignment with business strategy:

2

Manage Your Application Portfolio
Primary driver of effective selection of enterprise applications

Is your portfolio redundant, complex, obsolete, or plagued by technical debt? Our Concierge Service will help you make the case for transformation in terms the business will understand:

Are you struggling with application sprawl? Minimize risk and maximize value with a detailed inventory and a rationalization framework that will ensure the success of your application portfolio strategy:

Ready to move beyond maintenance? Ensure exceptional value with strong application management practices and an effective modernization approach:

What do users really think of your application portfolio? Complete our diagnostic to find out and develop data-driven insights to help you meet the damands of the business:

Does the business want more control over the tools they use? Stop being a gatekeeper; instead, guide the business to make good application decisions and be accountable for outcomes:

Is your collaboration toolset disordered or overburdened? We can help you create a collaboration strategy and a streamlined toolset that enhances security and meets employees' needs:

3

Transition to Product-Centric Delivery
Primary driver of the delivery of value throughout the life of your applications

Is a lack of clear product ownership slowing you down? Use our research to structure your teams, capabilities, processes, and technologies to better support product delivery:

A vision without tactics is an unsubstantiated dream. This blueprint can help you define your product vision, build a backlog and product roadmap, and create a release plan to deliver value.

Deliver value at the scale of your organization through defining enterprise product families.

Do your product owners have the complete picture of what’s needed to succeed? Strengthen the product owner role by focusing on core capabilities and proper alignment:

4

Implement Agile, DevOps, and BizDevOps
Primary driver of the ability to manage changing application delivery priorities

Are you thinking of moving to Agile? Or are you trying to improve or exand your Agile/DevOps practices? Find all the tools and advice you need to be successful in one place:

Are your agile teams stuggling? Get help with building the right practices for your organization.

If you haven't started yet or are trying to figure out how to make it work, read this blueprint, which includes a one-day education session for leaders and a pilot implementation workshop:

Being Agile isn't about processes; it's about people. As part of maturing your Agile practice, you'll want to evaluate if you have the right skills and capabilities in place:

Are you ready to start your Agile journey? Our Concierge Service will help you quickly assess your Agile readiness and plan your implementation:

Once you're seeing success with your pilot implementations, you can start to roll out Agile to the organization. Use our structured approach to scale Agile and facilitate ongoing alignment:

Are you ready to start your DevOps journey? Understand your organization's challenges and the DevOps capabilities you desire and define an achievable adoption roadmap:

5

Modernize Your SDLC
The primary driver of application delivery throughput is a modern, quality-centric SDLC

Delivery quality and throughput go hand in hand. Focus on meeting minimum process and product quality standards first, and improved throughput will follow. Learn how:

Testing should be viewed not as a support capability but as an enabler of business growth. Adopt QA good practices to ensure your tests satisfy your criteria for a successful, high-quality product:

Having poor requirements is the number one reason projects fail. To avoid makeshift solutions, gather requirements with the desired future state in mind:

Does your application architecture reflect stakeholders' current needs? Translate stakeholder objectives into architecture requirements, solutions, and changes:

Look beyond your release tools to the processes they support. Deliver high-quality releases on time through accountability and governance supported by tools. Use this blueprint to right-size your processes:

Is your application maintenance backlog out of control? Our research will help you establish and govern a repeatable maintenance process and instill development best practices:

Continuous business process improvement is critical in today's competitive environment. Structure your approach and establish a program that is focused on tangible results:

Don't let security get left behind! Shift security left and identify opportunities to embed security earlier in the development pipeline:

6

Get the Most Out of Your Enterprise Applications
Primary driver of ROI from your Enterprise Applications is strategy-driven selection, implementation, and optimization practices

Human Resources Management (HRM/HCM/HRMS/HRIS)

Often the relationship between IT and HR is not optimal for technology decision making. Build an HRIS roadmap aligned with your organization's priorities for a clear path forward:

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

ERP projects often go over budget, and they often fail. Use our research to define your strategy and an actionable roadmap to benefits realization:

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Design an end-to-end technology strategy to drive sales revenue, enhance marketing effectiveness, and create compelling experiences for your customers:

Applications Leadership Team

Alex Ciraco

Principal Research Director

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Andrew Kum-Seun

Senior Research Analyst

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Ari Glaizel

Practice Lead

Hans Eckman

Principal Reasearch Director

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Lisa Highfield

Research Director

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Robert Fayle

Research Lead

Suneel Ghei

Principal Research Director

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Hong Kwok

Advisory Director

Ricardo de Oliveira

Research Director

Vince Mirabelli

Principal Research Director

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