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Application portfolio management

The EA problem

The application portfolio is where most architecture effort — and most organizational money — actually lives. The questions leadership keeps asking are deceptively simple: What do we run? What does each thing cost and support? Which ones are critical? Which overlap? Which should we invest in, keep as-is, or retire? Answering them requires the portfolio to be catalogued, classified, and connected — and kept current.

How ArcaMira addresses it

An enriched portfolio view (Estate → Assets, Applications lens, /assets?lens=applications): a filterable list with stats tiles and risk columns — criticality tier, lifecycle status, capability coverage, and technology risk — so the portfolio's shape is visible at a glance rather than buried in a spreadsheet.

A purpose-built application page that leads with what matters:

  • Criticality (T1/T2/T3) — an architect's judgement, set inline.
  • Profile strip — product owner, lifecycle, version, support dates, monthly cost, technical contact — all inline-editable (click a field; no edit mode).
  • Architecture context — the capabilities it realises (its why) and the technology it runs on (its how), in two columns.
  • Signals bar — surfaces actionable issues: never checked in, ARB review in progress, NFR contradictions in the dependency chain, no owning org unit.
  • Derived business owner — shown read-only, flowing from the capabilities the app realises (see Ownership).

Low-friction cataloguing. Import a CMDB or application list as CSV (with duplicate-detection on the way in), then enrich incrementally. Cloud and CMDB sync (AWS/Azure/ServiceNow) feed a discovery queue rather than auto-creating noise.

Cost roll-up. Where cost data exists (manual or synced), it rolls up capability → application → technology, so you can see spend by business function.

What good looks like

  • Every active application has: a criticality tier, a lifecycle status, a product owner, and at least one capability link.
  • Redundancy is visible — capabilities served by several overlapping applications are candidates for consolidation.
  • The portfolio view is the team's working surface, not a quarterly export.
  • Retirement candidates (low criticality + end-of-life tech + redundant) are identifiable in a few clicks.

What ArcaMira deliberately leaves out

It does not rate applications by self-reported business value or technical quality via owner surveys — that path produces inflated, unreliable data and drifts into operational territory. Criticality is architect-set; technical risk is derived from objective lifecycle/EOL signals. See Ownership & accountability.