One true list of every application you run

What application portfolio management is

An application portfolio is the complete list of applications your organisation runs, with four things recorded for each: who owns it, what it costs, what stage of its life it is in, and how much risk it carries. Application portfolio management is keeping that list true and using it to make decisions. It answers what to consolidate, what to renew and what to retire before it becomes a problem instead of after.

Most organisations never get past the first part. The list exists, but it is split across a spreadsheet, three people's memory and the last vendor renewal email, and it is out of date within a week of anyone updating it. The cost of that gap is specific. Two teams pay for software that does the same job. Applications have no named owner. Contracts and end-of-life dates arrive as a surprise because nothing was watching them. It surfaces at the worst moment, when an audit, a security review or an acquirer asks for the current landscape and the honest answer is a diagram drawn months ago by someone who has since left.

A portfolio that holds up has ownership and cost attached to every application, not only the ones someone remembered to document. Renewal and retirement dates are visible before they are urgent, and duplicate spend shows up on its own instead of during a budget review.

How it works in Entelim

1. Connect GitHub or import a file. Connect GitHub or Jira at sign-up and Entelim proposes your applications, owners and dependencies; nothing enters the inventory until a person approves it. Or import a spreadsheet: CSV and Excel files are supported, with a preview before anything is saved, an import history, and a rollback for an import you did not mean to make. You can also bring in an existing ArchiMate model, which is covered in importing an ArchiMate model. To record a single application yourself, add it with its name, code, type, business criticality, deployment status, lifecycle status, business owner and description.
2. Read the list. The Applications page shows every application with its type, lifecycle status, criticality, business owner, vendor and capability. Filter by search text, type, lifecycle status, business domain and capability level, sort the columns, and switch decommissioned applications on or off. A data quality strip above the list states how many applications in the portfolio have a named owner and a vendor recorded.
3. Fill the gaps in bulk. Select several applications and set their lifecycle stage, assign an owner or add a tag in one step. An application can carry several owners: primary, backup, technical and business. Entelim also suggests business capabilities for an application, and you accept or ignore each suggestion.
4. Record the cost. Cost fields on the application include total cost of ownership and annual licence cost, and the Data Enrichment screen under Rationalization lets you add cost, ownership and criticality to many applications in one pass.
5. Open the fact sheet. Each application has a fact sheet that gathers its identity, owners, annual and licence cost, lifecycle signal (including the days left before a retirement date), the capabilities it supports, the diagrams it appears on, its linked risks and a record completeness score. The score is out of 100 and weighs owner, business criticality, lifecycle and total cost of ownership most heavily, then business domain, technology stack, deployment model, data classification, vendor, disaster recovery and description. A panel lists exactly which fields are missing.
6. Check ownership by business unit. The ownership coverage page shows, for each business unit, how many of its applications have an assigned owner. It is open to the CTO and portfolio manager roles.
7. Export. Download the portfolio as CSV for anyone who needs it outside Entelim.

The screenshot on this page shows the application list for the demonstration company.

Application dependencies

An application dependency is a connection where one application relies on another for data, authentication or a shared capability. In Entelim, once an application is linked to its ArchiMate element, its fact sheet lists what it depends on and what depends on it, and a View impact graph button opens the graph centred on that element. For the question people ask during an outage or before a decommission, read what breaks if a service fails, and who gets called, which answers it across every layer with the owner of each affected element.

What you get

• One inventory of every application, searchable and filterable, with lifecycle, criticality, owner, vendor and capability on each row.
• Several owners per application, in four roles, with a portfolio-wide count of applications that have none.
• A fact sheet per application with a record completeness score and a list of missing fields.
• Cost fields, including total cost of ownership and annual licence cost, that feed Rationalization and the Business Case module.
• Dependencies upstream and downstream of each application that is linked to the architecture model, with an impact graph.
• Bulk actions for lifecycle stage, owner and tags.
• Import from CSV, Excel or an ArchiMate model with history and rollback, and CSV export.

Limits

The inventory is what your connected repositories and Jira propose and a person approves, plus what you import or add. Entelim does not scan your network for applications.

Dependencies appear for applications linked to an element in your ArchiMate model. An application with no link shows no dependencies, and the fact sheet says so instead of guessing.

A figure that is not recorded is shown as missing. The completeness score counts it as a gap and does not fill it in.

Pair the module with Procurement for contracts and renewals, and with Vendors for the suppliers behind each application.

Questions it answers

Related modules

Plan

The plans differ by how many people can edit and by the extras listed on the pricing page, not by which modules you get. See Entelim pricing, browse all modules, or read how Entelim compares with ServiceNow Application Portfolio Management.