Application Lifecycle Management vs. Portfolio Management

ALM can be seen as part of an application portfolio management discipline, which takes a view on groupings of applications that can become outdated, marginal, or cost-prohibitive. Continued cost pressures and changing and expanding requirements, coupled with legacy integration challenges, make a compelling case for full-scale application portfolio analysis, making it a critical component of Enterprise Architecture. Although picking retirement candidates might prove easy, the actual “retirement”, which includes complicated extrication and often long-term data requirements, demands strong project plans, tools and technical skills. In most cases retirement requires extensive effort (at a cost) by the business to manage the change of migrating to a new target application.