Define the Enterprise Application Portfolio and How Portfolio Scope Can Be Domain-Specific or Enterprise-Wide

Overview

Application Portfolio Management is often assumed to operate only at the enterprise level — governing the complete set of applications an organization owns, operates, or depends upon. In practice, APM as a discipline applies equally well to a narrower scope. A business unit, department, or functional domain can apply the same governance, assessment, and lifecycle practices to just the applications relevant to its own context — for example, all Sales-related applications, or all Manufacturing-related applications — without waiting for an enterprise-wide program to exist. The complete, enterprise-wide application portfolio, referred to in this document as the Enterprise Application Portfolio, is simply the aggregate: every application the enterprise owns, operates, or depends upon, regardless of which domain or business unit governs it day to day.

Best Practice

Apply the practices in this document to whichever portfolio scope is relevant to the reader’s context: a specific domain, business unit, or functional area, or the complete Enterprise Application Portfolio. Throughout the rest of this document, the generic term “portfolio” is used rather than repeatedly specifying “domain-specific” or “enterprise-wide” — readers should interpret every reference to “the portfolio” as scoped to whichever context they are governing, whether that is a single domain or the entire enterprise. Organizations building APM incrementally often start with a domain-specific portfolio where ownership and value are easiest to demonstrate, then extend the same governance model outward until it reaches full enterprise coverage. Both starting points are valid; what matters is that the scope is explicitly declared and consistently applied, not left ambiguous.

Benefit(s)

Explicitly declaring portfolio scope prevents the confusion that arises when different stakeholders assume different boundaries for “the portfolio” without realizing it — a Sales stakeholder assuming Sales-only scope while an enterprise architect assumes full enterprise scope, each unaware the other means something different. Domain-specific portfolios let individual business units or functions establish APM discipline and demonstrate value quickly, without needing enterprise-wide sponsorship first. The Enterprise Application Portfolio, once aggregated, gives leadership the complete picture needed for enterprise-level investment, risk, and rationalization decisions that no single domain’s portfolio can support alone. Using the generic term “portfolio” throughout this document, with scope explicitly established once in this chapter, keeps every other chapter applicable regardless of which scope the reader is operating at.