Application Portfolio Management

TIME stands for Tolerate, Invest, Migrate, and Eliminate. It is an application portfolio rationalisation framework that classifies each application by its business value and technical quality, producing clear investment decisions: maintain adequate systems, invest in strategic ones, migrate from poor-fit systems, or eliminate redundant applications.

We use a combination of structured data collection from IT finance, architecture, and business stakeholders, supplemented by architecture repository data if available. For large portfolios, we prioritise by business domain to ensure the most strategic decisions are addressed first.

Yes. Identifying shadow IT and unmanaged applications is part of the inventory scope. We typically discover these through business stakeholder interviews and application cost data review, and include them in the portfolio assessment.

Cross-domain applications are handled by mapping their business capability coverage and identifying all stakeholder communities. TIME decisions for these applications require alignment across multiple business owners, which we facilitate through structured workshops.

Savings vary by organisation, but most large enterprise application portfolios have 15–30% of applications that are candidates for retirement or consolidation. Licence savings, support cost reduction, and integration simplification typically contribute to measurable TCO reduction within 2–3 years.

In five steps: (1) inventory and discovery of the full application estate including ownership, cost, and integration dependencies, (2) a fitness assessment of each application by business fit and technical health, (3) TIME classification (Tolerate, Invest, Migrate, Eliminate), (4) consolidation and TCO analysis for prioritised candidates, and (5) a phased rationalisation roadmap with a business case. Typical duration is 4–10 weeks, depending on portfolio size and data availability.

We assess each application along the two TIME dimensions — business value and technical quality — made concrete through several criteria: business fit and actual usage, vendor lifecycle and support status (end-of-life risk), technical health and maintainability, total cost of ownership (licence, operating, and integration costs), integration dependencies, and compliance and security risk. The result is an auditable portfolio heat map.

IT Landscape Analysis produces the factual inventory — what actually exists (applications, infrastructure, integrations, data flows). Application Portfolio Management builds on that and makes the strategic assessment and investment decision per application (TIME classification, consolidation, rationalisation roadmap). In practice, the landscape analysis is often the starting point and portfolio management the decision step.

Yes. Portamus has led application landscapes and enterprise architecture programmes for large enterprises and public administrations across Germany, Switzerland, and Europe — including government data-centre consolidation and tax-administration modernisation. Selected project examples are in our case studies; comparable, specific references are shared during an initial consultation.