“Application Portfolio Management (APM) is the ongoing application of systematic and structured decision-making processes to evaluate an organization’s applications along various dimensions (from a business and a technical viewpoint), weigh various actions for the purpose of optimization, and implement appropriate actions to resolve identified issues and meet key enterprise objectives. The promise of Application Portfolio Management lies primarily in reducing the complexity of the application landscape, which is approached from a holistic viewpoint.”

Application Portfolio Management is often associated with and based on the four main domains of The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF):

• Business Architecture
• Data Architecture
• Applications Architecture
• Technology Architecture

These four domains combined with the principles of (Financial) Portfolio Management allows organizations to start rationalizing the complete Application Portfolio and align it to the organizational strategies and goals.

APM helps organizations to determine the business value of the currently used applications, to start eliminating those applications that don’t meet the strategic goals or don’t deliver the desired value, and start working in a forward-thinking, proactive approach towards application management.