6 STEPS TO DATA-DRIVEN IT PLANNING & BUDGETING

Controlling costs requires understanding the sources of complexity.

IT has become cluttered with obsolete systems

that no longer deliver full value to the business.

What’s worse is the obsolete process by which these

systems continue to secure funding – gut feel, allocation

and squeaking wheels.

The size and complexity of the IT landscape are

increasing, yet we lack the fundamental insight into

what to do about it. As a result, myopic, subjective

processes displace a methodical, fact-based approach

to effective IT planning and budgeting.

"67% of IT budget is spent

keeping the lights on,

19% supports growth

of current business …

only 14% is allocated to

genuine transformational IT."

Dave Aron, Gartner

Jim Duggan, Gartner

Fractious planning is ineffective and erodes trust between business and IT.

Successful planning replaces gut feel

with objective, fact based analysis.

CAST HIGHLIGHT transforms IT budgeting and planning

by automating the technical discovery process and

creating insight needed to make better decisions. Using

code analysis, CAST HIGHLIGHT derives application

measures (size and complexity) as well as maintainability

and the potential for production failures. When

combined with your company’s subject matter expertise,

this data forms the insight needed to develop and

implement an effective IT plan and budget.

Source: Capgemini 2011 Application Landscape Report

"Our business is rapidly

changing and it’s fair to say that

our application landscape –

both in terms of its complexity

and its lack of flexibility –

is now more an inhibitor to

innovation than a driver of it.”

Capgemini 2014 Application Landscape Report

1. Establish a Baseline

Quantified assessment of the

technical quality and vulnerabilities

of the application portfolio is the

foundation for effective

decision making.

Yet a typical IT budgeting process is

subjective, manual and fraught with bias.

CAST HIGHLIGHT’s cloud platform enables

around the clock analysis of applications,

accelerating time-to-value, reducing burden

and delivering fact-based data such as key

performance indicators and industry

benchmarks.

IT PORTFOLIO TREND ANALYSIS Establishing a baseline of key performance indicators is a foundation for early detection of troubled systems, automated health monitoring

and objective performance measurement.

2. Rationalize the Process, Then the Portfolio

Use a disciplined approach to

identifying and eliminating

low-value applications.

The promise of reducing the size of a

portfolio and consolidating redundant

applications is rarely realized, since there

is typically a lack of reliable data that allows

for objective side-by-side comparison of

applications.

CAST HIGHLIGHT provides a standard

classification and industry benchmarks that

enable objective comparison of technical

risk and maintainability. When combined

with your subject matter expertise, this data

creates the insight needed to support

rational application decisions.

APPLICATION RATIONALIZATION Side by side comparison of applications by key performance

indicators and business value supported by industry benchmarks.

3. Level the Playing Field

IT ecosystems include outsourced and

dispersed development teams, vendor

managed applications and third-party

packaged solutions.

A cloud service, CAST HIGHLIGHT provides

a consistent, repeatable approach for

stakeholders to create fair and credible

assessments across all applications within

a single ecosystem.

All application owners contribute to the

analysis without intellectual property

risk and there is no burden on limited

resources—maximizing participation and

creating the objectivity and facts needed

to disarm bias and break through fiefdoms.

BUSINESS VALUE AT RISK By combining automated code analysis with subject matter expertise,

CAST HIGHLIGHT identifies the technical risk of your applications to enable true alignment between business needs and IT resourcing and planning.

4. Create Visibility

True visibility into a portfolio is only

possible when all applications, not just

the top concerns, are analyzed.

Most planning processes do not scale well

and therefore focus on “critical” or “highly

visible” systems, when in most cases it is

the ‘long tail’, the many small applications,

that drain budgets and proliferate risk

across an organization.

CAST HIGHLIGHT enables all applications

to be included in the planning process –

regardless of size or political visibility. It is

through this holistic perspective and robust

reporting that CAST’s platform can generate

the views needed to quickly identify risks

and opportunities for cost reduction.

DEVELOPMENT SOURCE VS TECHNICAL RISK CAST HIGHLIGHT provides objective measures of

applications’ technical risks by development source.

Technical Debt is the cost of fixing

application quality problems that,

if left unfixed, put the business at

serious risk.

Technical Debt is quickly finding its way into

ROI discussions and C-level dashboards. It

provides a financial value of application

quality problems that are highly likely to

cause business disruption and will make the

application more difficult to enhance over

time. CAST HIGHLIGHT measures Technical

Debt and benchmarks applications against

industry standards. Adding a KPI that puts

risk in financial terms helps IT partner with

business and broker mutually beneficial

plans and funding profiles.

TECHNICAL DEBT PROFILE CAST HIGHLIGHT estimates Technical Debt of applications to help form a risk

reduction strategy based on severity and impact to the overall portfolio.

5. Shed Technical Debt

SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE ESTIMATE CAST HIGHLIGHT calculates an industry standard effort to maintain each application

based on the technical measures derived from the code analysis and drivers from survey answers. This benchmark is compared against current staffing.

6. Reduce Maintenance Costs

67% of IT budget is dedicated

to Keeping the Lights On.

As applications age, maintenance budgets

continue to outpace budget increases

and throttle an organization’s ability to

proactively pursue strategic initiatives

and react to new business opportunities

and threats.

Imagine the ability to identify applications

that are draining budgets and expose the

root cause of maintainability issues

resulting in understanding which

applications may be underfunded and

which are consuming excessive resources.

How Rapid Portfolio Analysis Works

A code-level analysis of each application

calculates technical metrics such as size,

type of technology and complexity.

The evaluation determines the technical

quality of each application based on

programming rules and code patterns

that lead to production risk, poor

adaptability and complexity.

The technical assessment is combined

with input from application owners to

capture information such as staffing

profiles, functional purpose, age,

development mix and mode.

All of these data are compiled at the

portfolio level and packaged into

customized reports and charts that

support critical planning decisions

such as resource strategies, application

rationalization, outsourcing and portfolio

optimization.

85% of IT executives know their portfolios are in need of rationalization.

Knowing you need to rationalize your portfolio is much

different than proving you need to do it. Gathering

data from disparate sources and time-consuming

manual analysis and reporting amounts to suspect

insight that is unverifiable when challenged by

business leaders. Lack of convincing business cases

and unreliable intelligence significantly hinders efforts

to bring order to the chaos. This fractious process

makes planning ineffective and erodes trust between

business and IT.

Myopic, subjective,

and non-responsive

processes are no longer

acceptable.

Source: Capgemini 2011 Application Landscape Report

The Value of Science: Objective, Insightful & Automated

Organizations that use CAST HIGHLIGHT:

• Shift IT investments towards business innovation

by reducing maintenance cost and operations.

• Align IT priorities and investment decisions more

effectively with the business.

• Replace bias with objective, defendable insight.

• Accelerate data collection and analysis while reaching

across boundaries to provide a full view of the IT

landscape.

• Inject facts into assessments of systems – facts that

form the basis of credible and defendable IT investment

decisions.

"CAST HIGHLIGHT is a

game-changer! A long awaited

dream of CIOs to gain ultra-quick

insight into their portfolios in a

simple and secure manner.“

Hari Thalapalli - Tech Mahindra

CAST is helping clients across the globe rapidly gain

unprecedented insight into their portfolios every

day. Whether you are in the middle of a budgeting

process or ramping up for one, you can’t afford to

make decisions based on limited visibility and gut feel.

Try the CAST HIGHLIGHT demo!

www.casthighlight.com/demo