The tutorial questions for this week involve a case study of a fictional university with focus on application portfolio management (APM). The case study considers that the fictitious university has a set of typical systems (3 described below). This list of applications is far from being complete but it is mainly aimed at providing a few applications that can be assessed using APM techniques for practice.

Your task is to assess each of these systems from an APM perspective and suggest a future trajectory for each one. In this tutorial, we will use the Gartner TIME approach. Two articles (below) have been provided in the 'week 5' folder to help you with the assessment (the first gives an overview of the process and the second gives details on the assessment processes). Your individual assessments for each system may vary but attempt this exercise as best as you can. You can also make assumptions about the applications, and if you do, please include these to justify your assessment.

Q1

For each system, make an assessment of its business value and technical fitness. Provide a brief justification for your assessment and note the factors that you saw as being more important.

Q2

Decide on which element of Gartner's TIME approach is applicable to each of the systems in the future (Tolerate, Invest, Migrate, or Eliminate)?

Q3

Provide some thoughts on the limitations in using such the TIME approach. Are there other factors you think might be helpful in deciding the fate of a system or the priority for re-development/maintenance?

Three Systems

1. 1. ERPone - An enterprise and administrative support system which includes accounts (general ledger, accounts receivable, accounts payable and purchasing), personnel and payroll. This is an off the shelf commercial Unix/Oracle based system. This system is getting fairly mature (about 12 years old and has included several maintenance upgrades in this time). It does support modern workflow practices such as online entry and approval of leave applications through a web interface. However, some of the "personnel" functions and other functions have not been fully implemented as they do not suit the modern business requirements. The implementation of other HR modules is currently under consideration.
   2. ST-RECone - A student records system which is a purchased software package with limited in-house customisation for student records. It is based around an Oracle database environment, and is accessed mostly through an Oracle forms interface, but does have a web interface for some simple reporting functionality, and a web interface for some student inputs and reports, accessible through the student dashboard. The web interfaces are part of the local customisations. The turbulent government policy environment with respect to higher education is putting some stress on the ability of this system to keep pace with changing business requirements, but the vendor generally responds to these changes. There is a very limited market for student records systems, hence there are few options for a replacement system.
   3. CanvasLMS - A learning management system that supports teaching and learning activities. It is based on a commercial product (Canvas) and is managed by an outsourced provider. This system was only recently implemented (about 2.5 years ago), replacing an older system and the implementation process appears to have been successful.