Skip to content

Playbook — See your application portfolio

Outcome: one screen that answers "what applications do we have, who owns them, what business capability do they support, and which are risky?"

The situation

You've just inherited an estate (new role, post-merger, or the first time anyone's tried to get a grip on it) and the honest answer to "how many applications do we run?" is a shrug or three conflicting spreadsheets. Someone wants a single, credible portfolio view — and they want it to stay current, not rot in a slide.

You'll walk away with

A live, enriched application list with stat tiles and per-app columns for owner, criticality, lifecycle, capability coverage (what it supports), and technology risk — filterable down to whatever question you're being asked this week.

Before you start

A list of your applications. Even a rough CSV with names is enough to begin; everything else can be enriched in place.

Steps

  1. Import your applications. Add & Connect → Import / Export (/import) → CSV of applications. Useful columns: name, status, owner, criticality, vendor, lifecycle. The preview and near-duplicate detection stop you from importing the same app twice under three spellings. → Detail: Cataloguing applications
  2. Map applications to the capabilities they support (optional, but this is what makes the portfolio strategic rather than just a list). Add & Connect → Discover (/discover) suggests app → capability links using AI; you click to confirm each one. → Detail: Discovery & connecting
  3. Open the portfolio. Estate → Assets (/assets) → switch to the Applications lens. You'll see the stat tiles up top and the enriched list below — capability coverage and technology-risk columns are computed for you from the links you made.
  4. Filter to the question. Sort or filter by missing owner, by criticality, by technology risk — whatever the conversation needs. The same screen answers "what's unowned?", "what's our T1 estate?", and "what's running on something end-of-life?"

Where people get stuck

The portfolio is only as rich as the links behind it. With names alone you get a clean inventory; the capability and tech-risk columns only light up once you've done step 2 (capability mapping) and connected applications to their technologies. The mapping is AI-assisted (suggest-and-confirm, not blank-slate), but it's still a pass someone has to make — and a great thing to do for a new user so their portfolio looks alive on first open.

Make it stick

Assign owners as you go (there's an inline assign action on unowned rows here and on the Estate Health page). A portfolio with named owners becomes a governance instrument — you can route reviews, check-ins, and change notifications to real people — which is what keeps people coming back to it.