Performing an Application Assessment in 4 Steps
Trying to decide if your applications are performing well, or if you have the right set of applications? Many times, this is an exercise in opinion and anecdote, conducted via face-to-face interviews with your users. Opinion is important. But what if you could back that opinion with comprehensive data to make your strategic decisions about applications more objective?
Performing a thorough Application Assessment gives you this insight.
Steps to an Effective Application Assessment
Step 1: Create the List
The first step in an application assessment is determining the comprehensive list of all applications in use. This step alone can be revealing. You begin to see what applications are duplicative, i.e., one department uses MailChimp, another uses Constant Contact. Also, you see what “shadow IT” has been established by segments of users, such as Slack for one group and Teams for another, or personal Dropbox accounts are being used to communicate documents to members. This list will also include “not so normal” applications, things that may have been custom-built or developed in-house.
The goal of this initial step is strictly to gather information about what applications are in use.
Step 2: Gathering Usage Information
The next step in an application assessment is to gather information about how these applications are being used. To achieve this, we leverage our partnership with Info-Tech Research to conduct a survey of users and ask key questions about how users view the applications they use.
Through this short survey, you gain insight into application effectiveness--- what applications are failing, which are working, whether the data in the applications is trusted--- and begin to see the full application landscape.
Data and opinion have been gathered--- now what?
Step 3: Creating Scorecards
The Application Assessment tool then takes the data and creates application-by-application scorecards to include (but not limited to) such things as the following:
- Top 5 applications
- Bottom 5 applications
- Applications at risk
- Department by department review of applications
- Application by application review of health
- Health of data within application
Step 4: Interviews
Using the application scores as a spur to deeper investigation, follow-up interviews with teams can be conducted. The difference is, you are going in with specific questions about information the tool has provided. This reduces the time required to get to that deeper dive.
An additional benefit to the Application Assessment is the ability to benchmark against similar organizations through Info-Tech’s research. You’ll be able to see how your application landscape stacks up against real data from other organizations.
Through the power of data analytics, the scorecard produced gives you rich insight into the health of your application stack so that strategic, objective decisions can be made to strengthen it. Employing this tool and others in the suite of diagnostics used by Cimatri moves you from “I think this might be true,” about your applications to “I know this is true and I can see what to do.”
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