Application Inventory

Application Inventory

One important area to inventory is your application system. There are two types of applications.

1. First are your business applications, which are the software systems that you use to run your company and manage your business.
   
   Examples of business applications include financial systems such as:
   
   General Ledger, Accounts Receivable, Payroll, Human Resources, Customer Relationship Management, etc.
   
   Make sure that you inventory the applications that your company developed, as well as all packages and outsourced solutions.
   
   
2. The second type of is the software that runs your IT computer infrastructure. These are typically not used by the client organizations, but are internal to IT only. This group of applications might include Help Desk software, IT Asset Management, Job Scheduling, Network Management, etc.
   
   These are all larger software systems that typically require ongoing support.
   
   

Many organizations already have an up-to-date application inventory. If you do, then use it - don't recapture everything. However, if you don't think you have one, you may still be in luck.

More than likely, your company completed an application inventory as a part of your YR2K preparations. If you can find this inventory, you can use it as the starting point for this portfolio management process.

If your organization has not kept the inventory up-to-date, you will still need to validate the information. However, this will be easier than having to start from scratch.

An application inventory describes the specific applications in your organization (or company). This inventory becomes a communication vehicle to highlight the scope of your application support organization’s responsibilities.

Information on the inventory includes:

• Application name.

• Purpose. The business purpose of the application.

• A designation of vendor/internal to signify whether this is a third-party package written by a vendor or developed in-house.

• Releases or versions to identify the current release(s) that you are supporting. Third party packages always have versions or releases, as do many internally developed applications. You may be responsible for supporting more than one release. If so, include all of the applicable versions.

• Platform/operating system.

• Software/hardware.

• Frequency of run. Detail how often the application runs, and the timing.

• Major interfaces. Describe other major applications that this one interfaces with.

• Much more. There are many, many characteristics that can be captured if they will be a help to your organization.

Application Maintenance Manual

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