Master Your Application Portfolio and Unlock Hidden Budget for AI Innovation

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In a Nutshell: In today's digital and increasingly AI-driven enterprises, an organization’s application portfolio isn't just a list of IT assets—it's a strategic reservoir of untapped resources. With organizations worldwide averaging 130 SaaS applications and facing increasing “application sprawl” due to shadow IT, the need for strategic portfolio management has never been more critical.

Organizations with optimized application portfolios are seeing up to 50% faster IT decision-making and unlocking millions in savings that can fuel AI initiatives. Through smart Application Portfolio Management (APM), companies like Jack in the Box can redirect $600k from redundant systems to strategic projects. Don’t let bloated application portfolios drain the business of money and momentum.

Jump to: 

• Strategic APM: Repositioning IT From Cost Centre to Value Driver
• The True Cost of Poor IT Management
• APM As Enterprise "Toolbox Management"
• 3 Common Challenges With Application Portfolio Management
• Strategic APM Success Story: Jack in the Box’s Portfolio Revolution With Ardoq
• Implementing APM: From Vision to Reality

• Forming a Foundation for the Future and AI Innovation

Strategic APM: Repositioning IT From Cost Centre to Value Driver

Strategic APM not only allows organizations to take back control of their IT investments but also realign resources around the capabilities that matter most to business priorities and strategy. When organizations today are increasingly digital, application sprawl poses a significant challenge. Businesses are struggling to manage an ever-growing portfolio of applications accumulated in their race to keep pace with business demands. By managing low-value IT systems out of the estate, organizations free up both budget and resources needed to drive strategy forward while working towards future goals.

Succeeding with APM demands more than procuring a tool to catalog applications. Enterprise Architects advise beginning with the key business objectives and the questions the organization wants to answer rather than making APM the end goal.  

"IT folks with great intentions recognize they need to get a better understanding of their world... but when you do that in isolation, you're not aligning to business objectives."
- How Cabinetworks' CTO Pioneered a Differentiated Customer Experience & Enhanced IT Efficiency with EA

The success of EA teams hinges on getting the business to understand why having a comprehensive view of the application landscape is crucial for driving strategic value. This alignment between IT initiatives and business goals transforms APM from a cost management exercise into a strategic driver for innovation.

Watch our APM deep-dive webinar for valuable insights and guidance on freeing valuable budget for AI Initiatives.

The True Cost of Poor IT Management

No organization sets out to have a poorly managed application portfolio. Growth happens, messy acquisitions and divestitures, leadership changes and the list goes on. However it is an issue choking every business whether it realizes it or not.

The numbers reveal the very real impact of ineffective portfolio management:

• 83 applications typically operate without clear business value
• 48% of enterprise applications are redundant or outdated
• Most enterprises spend 70-80% of their IT budget just maintaining existing applications
• Organizations average 130 SaaS applications, many unknown to IT 

With a problem of this magnitude and pervasiveness, it is little wonder that over 70% of organizations start with APM as a cornerstone of all change processes.

Learn more about how organizations can successfully adopt emerging technology to their strategic advantage in our report.

Think of APM As Enterprise “Toolbox Management”

Imagine the enterprise’s application portfolio as a craftsperson's toolbox. Each application is a tool. Like tools, they come in a range of functions. Some may be for everyday use, others for very specific tasks, and inevitably, some are duplicates or outdated. Just as a master craftsperson maintains an efficient toolbox, Enterprise Architects are the specialists charged with optimizing the enterprise’s “toolbox,” or application portfolio, to ensure every tool earns its place and delivers value.

The unfortunate reality is many organizations have let their "toolboxes" become cluttered and disorganized, resulting in redundancy, unclear usage patterns, and inefficient resource allocation. This complexity doesn't just drain IT budgets—it becomes a critical barrier when trying to fund and drive innovation initiatives like AI.

3 Common Challenges With Application Portfolio Management

With the proliferation of business technologists and cloud-based tools, the bar for acquiring new tech tools and toys has never been lower. This is a significant contributing factor to the increasingly complex challenge of maintaining efficient, value-driven application portfolios.

Recent research shows that 89% of organizations struggle to maintain full visibility and control across their IT portfolio, while 74% lack clear visibility into how technology adoption will impact regulatory compliance. As demonstrated by leading organizations like Jack in the Box, managing multiple brands and thousands of locations, these challenges have become even more critical as enterprises seek to optimize their technology investments while driving innovation.

1)  Inventory: Knowing What Applications Are in Your Landscape

Key factors of this challenge: 

• Limited information is spread across separate, disconnected documentation, often spreadsheets
• Time-consuming to update documentation, as it is often a manual process
• Many applications existing as “shadow IT”

Getting that much-needed visibility and beginning with inventorying can be the hardest part of any APM initiative. When we polled the attendees of our APM deep-dive webinar “Find Budget for AI Initiatives with Application Portfolio Management,” 56% ranked “lack of visibility into applications and dependencies” as their top challenge in managing their application portfolios.

Without clear visibility into application inventory, organizations struggle with an IT landscape that is continuously changing. With 82% of CIOs reporting difficulty in ensuring their technology investments translate to tangible benefits, modern enterprises need to:

• Create and maintain a more efficient and reliable single source of truth across evolving ecosystems
• Track total application count and usage patterns to prevent redundancy
• Identify and manage shadow IT and unauthorized applications
• Manage licensing and maintenance costs effectively
• Maintain accurate data integrity as systems evolve and change 

2) Assessment: Evaluating Applications With Data-Driven Insights

Key factors of this challenge: 

• Documentation is incomplete and unreliable
• Lack of data on actual usage and interdependencies on applications
• EA or IT organization lacks the resource and an efficienct process for attaining information, often gathered from time-consuming interviews with other teams who may not see the value of the exercise

Portfolio evaluation should be a continuous data-driven analysis exercise, not one based on gut feelings or a purely financial lens. Unfortunately with a lack of complete data and insights, gut feelings and the size of a price tag are often what misguides such initiatives. With 74% of CIOs reporting that delayed stakeholder input leaves them late out of the starting blocks, organizations must focus on:

• Technical fit and modernization needs
• Business value alignment and ROI
• Resource consumption patterns
• Stakeholder input and feedback

3) Optimization: Taking Action, Reallocating Funds and Cutting Redundancy

Key factors of this challenge: 

• Business-wide alignment on where cuts need to be made and why
• Ensuring the process is ongoing and not a one-time initiative
• Transparency and insight into the impact of optimization efforts

Having data-driven insights in hand are just the beginning of an APM initiative and actual rationalization is never the final step. Evaluation and optimization needs to be a highly efficient,  rigorous and continuous process in order to prevent the organization from future accumulation of unnecessary “tools”. In a landscape where applications are no longer static entities and 70% of CIOs struggle to maintain control while enabling innovation, modern portfolios require: 

• Strategic rationalization with clear metrics
• Clear retirement processes and lifecycle management
• Continuous improvement frameworks
• Data-driven decision-making that aligns with business goals

Strategic APM Success Story: Jack in the Box’s Portfolio Revolution With Ardoq

The journey of American fast food chain Jack in the Box helps illustrate the power of effective data-driven portfolio management across a complex multi-brand enterprise. Getting a clear, actionable overview of the IT landscape can be challenging enough for one organization but they had to grapple with additional complexity from their acquisition of Del Taco. However, through implementing a structured, data-driven approach to APM, they revolutionized decision-making across their organization.

As Fred Hennige, Director of Enterprise Architecture at Jack in the Box, explains:

"I needed to provide the linkage between the technology under the hood and the way the business operated to make smart decisions about where to pull things together and where to keep them separate."

What Did Jack In The Box Achieve?

1) 2,200+ Locations Unified

They needed to manage a complex IT ecosystem and have the landscape between the two brands, Jack in the Box and Del Taco, be as streamlined and efficient as possible. With Ardoq, they were able to align business and IT operations through data-driven architecture and create a standardized language between teams. This meant that instead of struggling with miscommunication due to different definitions between teams, they could move conversations over IT more quickly and clearly define how IT supported key capabilities in the business, which capabilities each brand would choose to maintain, and why. 

2) $600k in Savings Identified Within A Year

Instead of the typically painful spreadsheet-based approach, Jack in the Box was able to swiftly identify redundant systems through comprehensive analysis in the Ardoq platform. This meant they could rationalize applications much faster and more strategically than a purely financial perspective would allow them to. Leveraging the expertise of trusted Ardoq partner and leading consulting firm, Slalom, they were able to tackle optimizing their digital infrastructure in far less time than traditional methods would take. Not only were they pushing out redundant systems faster, this meant freeing up valuable resources to reassign to strategic initiatives.

3) 50% Faster Decisions

Speed is critical for organizational competitiveness and efficiency and Ardoq allows them to make decisions in half the time thanks to real-time insights and dependency mapping. No longer did they need to rely on gutfeel or outdated manually-updated documentation to understand the impact of changes on IT and operations. They could create tailored visualizations for key executive stakeholders as well as technical iterations, accelerating socialization of insights and strategic decision-making at all levels. 

How Did Jack In The Box Achieve This?

Their key success factor: business alignment.
As Fred emphasizes,

"Be very targeted in the outcomes you want to achieve—it's very easy as an architect to get pulled off in a direction that isn't outcomes-based. Being outcome aligned makes it much easier to get engagement and understand the value that is there."

Dive deeper into how Jack in the Box achieved their much needed alignment between business and IT over key outcomes with Ardoq: Transforming Operations with Data-Driven Architecture

Implementing APM: From Vision to Reality 

As highlighted by Fred, alignment is vital in successfully implementing APM and enjoying the benefits. There is no one-size-fits-all recipe but there are several field-tested principles and approaches that will set EA teams and their organizations up for success.

The objective should never be to capture data, but to understand the granularity of data needed to aid better decisions over IT and work backwards from there. This business outcomes-focused approach enables enterprises to start where they are, focusing on their most pressing needs, while building a foundational source of truth that can grow and evolve with their capabilities over time.

Ready to start shaping a more efficient application portfolio? Dive into our best practices from the experts.

Forming a Foundation for the Future and AI Innovation

Effective portfolio management requires both vision and practical execution. With a modern, data-driven approach to APM, organizations can:

• Spend less time collecting data and speed up time to insights
• Gain complete, automatically up-to-date visibility into their application landscape
• Make informed decisions about application investments
• Track progress and demonstrate value on an ongoing basis
• Transform portfolio management from a cost center to a value driver

When done right, APM serves as an information value chain that starts with harvesting data from front-line experts and ends with presenting actionable insight to senior executives. Enterprise Architects emphasize that success in this journey isn't just about data collection – it's about understanding your organization's readiness and maturity level. IT can gain very rich insights and cost savings, but an organization needs to be fully equipped to capitalize on these potential benefits.

Application Portfolio Management also then forms a reliable foundation for innovation and adopting AI. We have found that some of the key challenges with emerging technology adoption are:

• Giving decision-makers an informed head start as 74% of CIOs say it takes too long to gather stakeholder input, often leaving them late out of the starting blocks.
• Speeding up decision-making: 67% of CIOs say by the time they've made decisions about adopting emerging technology, they've often lost the competitive edge. 
• Maintaining effective governance and guardrails: 70% of CIOs say they can't maintain control of innovation without giving teams more autonomy while maintaining safe adoption practices

Book a demo to see how Ardoq can help you unlock hidden budget for AI innovation and business transformation.