Xebia Articles

Xebia IT Architects share improvements on Gartner’s TIME model for application portfolio management

Application Portfolio Management is about visualizing and managing applications within in an IT landscape on a regular and correct basis. It also makes it possible to analyse certain KPI’s to improve the quality of your IT portfolio. The more practical and easy-to-understand a model is, the more supportive it can be for IT managers in this respect. Read here some enhancements to the Gartner TIME model.

The business mindset is shifting to one where expertise is never fully achieved or accomplished. It’s crucial to nurture professional development as a constant, evolving process. This new mindset means that companies must continually “refresh” and refortify their established experts and nurture the growth of new ones. Forward-thinking companies do this by committing to ongoing training programs that focus on applicable knowledge instead of textbook skills.

Software is becoming more and more business critical. Whether you’re delivering excellent e-commerce experiences or online banking, applying operational analytics is needed to monitor software and achieve zero-downtime. While operational analytics is still advancing, one thing remains certain. Whether operational analytics is being applied now or later, this technology will be adopted more in the next three years. Applying operational analytics to proactively address issues and prevent future outages is the way digital enterprises of the future are moving towards zero-downtime today.

DevOps is at the heart of successful enterprises around the world. It not only saves time and money, it adds value. Very short development stages, often no more than a few hours, benefit to the success. How can organizations reduce cost and time-to-market while still offering quality and have their developers focus on innovation? How can you identify and highlight surprising data at an early stage? That’s where DevOps software comes in. Take note of three significant DevOps Trends that organizations are facing in the future.

These days, ec = ic, that is, every company is an IT company. DevOps provides a framework for examining and improving an organization’s individual software building blocks. Over the next couple of years, unanimous internal alignment will become the critical factor in successful DevOps. Early-adopters that have been doing DevOps for a while are now focusing on the best ways to organize their teams - from getting people with in-depth knowledge onboard to streamlining their (platform) teams.

Traditional organizations are confronted with competitors that are able to deliver value from innovation quickly. Companies that successfully make the change to complete digitization are enabled to deliver value to their customers in lightning speed, while traditional organizations struggle and only deliver new value in months or years. In order to survive the digital revolution, organizations need to become High Performance Organizations (HPO).

Contrary to popular belief in software development, you cannot test quality in. Rather, achieving quality is akin to growing a healthy tree: its health can only be observed by looking at the tree as a whole. Is the tree supported by a solid trunk, does its roots go deep, does it have healthy branches and leaves? Also, a large part of quality is seemingly invisible just like the amazing water system inside a tree.

Products and services are getting smarter. The Google Car can drives itself. Your phone knows how to take the best selfie and it even tells you when to leave to be on time for that important meeting. The systems that runs these services are able to use and understand data in a very smart way. Now it's time for IT operations to get smarter.

At LMAX where I worked for a while, they have extensive, world-class, automated acceptance testing. LMAX tests every aspect of their system and this is baked in to their development process. No story is deemed complete unless every acceptance criterion associated with it has a passing, automated, whole-system acceptance test.