Rapid Finacial Application Assessment
What Are The Benefits?
RAA is a value-added service that benefits both business and IT.
For Business, RAA can help to:
- Provide clarity to issues and questions related to the application; uncover reasons for past history
- Identify investment opportunities
- Steer future business initiatives
For IT, RAA can help to:
- Identify as-is state of the application health (Analyze current software architecture and implementation & Identify opportunities for componentization and reuse)
- Pinpoint an application's core strengths and weaknesses, and evaluate readiness to meet an organization's business and technology objectives
- Develop a roadmap to modernize an application architecture
- Identify gaps between application capabilities and IT vision, and potential remediation
RAA provides a foundation to gain a deeper understanding of the technology makeup and agility level of an organization's application software.
Common Questions from a CFO/CIO:
- When we make a change in our business, why does it take so long to reflect that change on our web site or in our business applications?
- Why do our application maintenance costs increase every year? How can we lower our TCO? Should we continue to invest and extend our legacy applications?
- What causes operational problems that affect our ability to deliver excellent service to our customers and employees?
In today's business climate, technology has the most pronounced effect on an organization's success. Application software has become one of the most treasured and valued assets of large corporations, and yet, it is often difficult to get answers to some of the basic questions that affect the business.
According to Forrester projections, IT spending in the U.S. will grow 6.6 percent in 2010 to $568 billion. Globally, IT spend will grow 8.1 percent in 2010 to top $1.6 trillion. Software and hardware will garner most of the investment as companies start a “new multi-year cycle of technology investment growth.” Forrester predicts a 7-year buying cycle led by analytics. Furthermore, it projects software spending, up 9.7 percent, and IT consulting and systems integration services up 6.8 percent. At the same time, according to a recent survey by market research firm IDC, nearly one-half of respondents indicated they plan to increase annual spending on mainframe hardware and software. The research further concludes that companies continue to invest in software and prolong their business applications life span.
Industry experts state that many companies embarking on smart computing efforts will have technologies such as service oriented architecture, virtualization and cloud computing as pillars. Companies that have successfully implemented a SOA program have realized lower TCO and increased business agility. How does one determine that business applications are capable of taking advantage of SOA/BPM?
ExadelFS Rapid Application Assessment (RAA) is a proven practice that combines tools, knowledge, software principles and methodology to inspect, assess, count, analyze and appraise application health. It is like taking an X-Ray of your critical business applications; the outcome of RAA provides an inside view of the application software asset and an objective assessment of the software's ability to respond to business and technology needs. RAA helps customers assess alignment of their applications portfolio or individual applications with the business goals, evaluate operational efficiency of applications, and provide recommendations addressing issues and uncovering opportunities for IT organizations to achieve their objectives. The following diagram illustrates the focus of RAA:
How does it work?
RAA is a time-boxed service delivered by experienced software architects, business analysts and application designers. The ExadelFS team works closely with our clients' business and IT domain experts to:
- Understand the history, business and technology drivers, requirements and objectives
- Collect key application statistics and data points using tools and reviews
- Inspect application architecture and patterns
- Analyze code and software structures
- Develop technology and application roadmap
- Develop feasibility study on specific business needs such as replacing legacy applications
The engagement team defines the set of documents for their initial review 1-2 weeks prior to the start of the review sessions with the client's staff. Initial interviews with the client's personnel, including agendas, are suggested based on the documents received. Additional information is gathered from both business and IT stakeholders to align objectives and vision. Additionally RAA can review and evaluate development and quality assurance methodology, processes and approach.
RAA utilizes a set of tools to analyze and inspect application internals as well as performs visual inspection and analysis of code against a set of predefined software principles and patterns. Recommendations are based on client specific requirements and needs