Use TIME to Engage the Business for Application

and Product Portfolio Triage

1 September 2020 - ID G00382785 - 20 min read
ARCHIVED This research is provided for historical perspective; portions may not reflect current

conditions.

By Analyst(s): Stefan Van Der Zijden, Bill Swanton

Aging application and product portfolios need more attention than

budgets allow. Application leaders should work with business
stakeholders to apply top-down analysis and TIME categorization
to prioritize opportunities for portfolio improvement using business
and technology fitness, risk and cost.

Newer version of this document

4 October 2021 Using TIME for Application and Product Portfolio Triage: Data From the
Field

Overview
Key Challenges
■ Application leaders often struggle with their existing application and product
portfolios in terms of business fitness, business value, agility, complexity, risk and
cost. These portfolios become obstacles that slow down digital business
optimization or transformation.

■ With limited budgets and limited appetite for change, application leaders require a
quick and fact-based approach to identify and prioritize improvement initiatives that
matter most to business and IT.

■ Business engagement is a vital element of any application portfolio effort, and

initiatives without business input and consent are the most likely to fail.

■ Improving the application portfolio never stops and requires a method to

continuously identify and prioritize opportunities.

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 Recommendations
As an application leader responsible for application and product portfolio governance, you
should:

■ Triage your application and product portfolio by using the Gartner tolerate, invest,
migrate and eliminate (TIME) model as a quick business-oriented assessment,
dividing the portfolio into the four application strategy categories.

■ Define an initial remediation strategy for each of the four TIME application strategy
categories by using the characteristics and recommendations in this document.

■ Engage and involve business stakeholders by discussing the TIME model, and jointly
identify and prioritize improvement opportunities.

■ Support continuous improvement of the application portfolio by assessing the

portfolio regularly.

With budget restrictions and limited appetite for risk and change, the question becomes:
“Where must we start improving our portfolio?” And the answer: “With those applications
where the pressure from business, technology and cost is so high that it creates a tipping
point so that both business and IT have a motivation to change.”

The business view is vital in the assessment. Making meaningful change to the
application or product portfolio will impact the business, and it must be able and willing to
support the change. The assessment must be very efficient to quickly identify and
prioritize the opportunities in collaboration with all stakeholders: business, IT and vendors
(if applicable). Exhaustive, bottom-up analysis should be saved for those parts of the
portfolio that need active intervention.

The goal of the TIME model (Figure 1) is to enable application leaders to assess their
application portfolio from a business, IT and cost perspective, then divide it into the four
TIME categories (tolerate, invest, migrate, and eliminate) to classify applications by
strategy. The TIME model is an effective instrument to communicate to all stakeholders. It
shows the portfolio health at a glance, and aids analysis and discussion for identifying
and prioritizing opportunities for improvement.

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 Figure 1. Use TIME to Assess an Application Portfolio Under Pressure

TIME = tolerate, invest, migrate and eliminate

Source: Gartner (March 2019)

Introduction
Application leaders are under pressure to change their application and product portfolios.
Many portfolios have hundreds or even thousands of applications and products. And
many of these have been around for years, have deteriorated in quality and fitness,
accumulated technical debt or are running on out-of-date application stacks and
platforms. This situation must change, but resources and budgets are limited and the risk
and impact of changing an application portfolio can be high.

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 Analysis
The classification of the portfolio elements into large groups is based on high-level, top-
down analysis of business and technical fitness of applications as applied to the needs of
the organization. Planning around high-level categories like “tolerate,” “invest,” “migrate”
and “eliminate” is a key step in the application portfolio management (APM) process, and
ensures a manageable and cost-effective program. TIME categorization reduces the
overall work and cost of assessments, and focuses further data collection efforts,
analysis and strategic planning on areas that are most likely to yield improvements.

The application and product portfolio assessment is also an important foundation for any
application strategy. It answers the questions: “Where are we now?” and “What are the
most relevant issues we need to fix in the near and long term?” The TIME model is
especially helpful as each category has its own distinct high-level strategy (see “Engage
the Business by Developing an Application Strategy Together”).

Figure 2 shows the TIME model with the applications and products in the portfolio scored
by business fitness, technical fitness and cost. By scoring an application on business
fitness (horizontal axis) and technical fitness (vertical axis), we can plot it on one of the
four TIME quadrants. The size of the bubble equates to the cost profile: the larger the
bubble, the worse the cost profile.

The scoring for technical fitness, business fitness and cost is based on a combination of
performance indicators. To keep this assessment as efficient as possible, the number of
indicators should be limited and “just enough” to give a relevant indication of health.
Gartner has defined a best practice for the process, suggested indicators for this
assessment, and has implemented these into a Toolkit (see “How to Assess Your
Application and Product Portfolio for Business and Technical Fitness” and “Toolkit:
Application Portfolio Business and Technical Fitness Assessment”). The Toolkit is Excel-
based. It creates TIME diagrams and redundancy tables, and links applications with pace
layers, business capability and organization units.

The TIME model gives a good illustration of the overall health of the portfolio and of the
position — and health — of individual applications.

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 Figure 2. TIME Categorization of Applications and Products in (Part of the) Portfolio

Source: Gartner (March 2019)

Triage Your Application and Product Portfolio by Using the TIME Model
The goal of the application portfolio assessment is to identify and prioritize the most
significant opportunities for improvement, and which applications and digital products are
an impediment to the business. Impediments can rise from poor business support
(business fitness) or technical health (technical fitness), but the most urgent cases suffer
from both.

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 Define an Initial Remediation Strategy for Each of the Four Application
Categories: Tolerate, Invest, Migrate and Eliminate
Grouping applications according to their characteristics (a top-down sorting) is a
meaningful way of categorizing the inventory and defining the actions to take and
destinies of the applications in the portfolio cycle.

Tolerate — Re-engineer
Applications in the “tolerate” category have a medium-to-high technical fitness and a low-
to-medium business fitness. From a risk perspective, they are not the applications with the
highest need of attention in the portfolio and are often left alone. They should, however,
be monitored in case they cross the tipping point where they need to be rebuilt or replaced
to meet business fitness.

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 Characteristics

■ The low-to-medium business fitness of applications in this category can point to

issues such as fit for purpose, ease of use, information quality and future potential.
They are not optimized or aligned to current business processes. In many cases, the
business fitness of these applications has deteriorated over time due to new
requirements being developed, changing business context and emerging new
technology.

■ Low business fitness can also come from a lack of agility: The application is not
able to keep up with the pace of change, or change comes with high risk and cost.
This can point to a cause in the technical domain; for example, a high level of
complexity or an application platform impeding a high pace of change.

■ Applications in the “tolerate” category have a medium-to-high technical fitness. This

means there are no major concerns from a technical perspective around risk and
quality aspects like stability, security, supportability and maintainability. Application
leaders can therefore wait until the business decides to spend money on improving
them.

■ From a portfolio perspective, these applications are “good enough,” especially if

there are applications in the “migrate” and “eliminate” categories that need more
attention.

■ Business fitness is the main concern, so applications in this category are tolerated
by the business. In many portfolios, the majority of the “tolerate” applications are
core systems or systems of record (in pace layer terms). If costs are acceptable, they
satisfy business needs at acceptable levels of risk and quality, but are not perceived
by users as delivering best support.

■ Many applications will move into this category at some point, and the boundary for
“good enough” shifts with every change in business context or technology. At some
point in time, this can create a tipping point: the business cannot tolerate the
applications any longer and has a business case to modernize. If cost profile is high,
this tipping point will be reached earlier.

■ In a large core system, a low business fitness might not apply for the whole system.
Older, larger applications can suffer from an 80/20 rule: 80% of issues related to
business fitness are caused by 20% of the application. You may need to separately
evaluate major modules or functional areas of the application from a business
capability perspective to get a true picture.

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 Recommendations

■ The recommendation for most organizations is to leave the applications in the

“tolerate” category alone, but keep a close watch on their overall fitness. Re-evaluate
the applications from time to time. Actions for this category will be initiated by the
business as it finds compelling reasons to improve business fitness.

■ Low-business-fitness applications are certainly candidates for elimination, but their

interplay with other systems (because of their role as core systems) may make
toleration a more realistic solution. Toleration, as an approach to legacy evolution,
can be a precursor to total elimination or replacement.

■ As an application’s technical fitness declines (moving down on the TIME graphic) or

its business fitness declines (moving left), the application may reach a tipping point
where the business is able and willing to modernize and improve it. A high cost
profile will create a higher urgency. Priority of those enhancements will be primarily
driven by the potential to improve business support, as opposed to the potential to
reduce risk.

■ Improving business support and business fitness requires a significant change in the
application’s functionality and user experience. Generally, this will require a rebuild or
replacement approach.

■ An application can suffer from a bad perception by users as a result of the 80/20
rule described above. In such cases, look to identify the components that cause
friction in business support. If a clearly identifiable subset of an application can be
restructured, then it can be provided as a separate capability. With the burdening
components removed, the fitness and life span of the remaining system will
improve.

Invest — Innovate, Evolve

Applications in the “invest” category have a medium-to-high technical fitness and a
medium-to-high business fitness. To keep them in shape, the business should invest in
these applications and evolve them.

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 Characteristics

■ Newer applications will dominate in this category. If a new application does not
feature in this category, then something has gone very wrong in the implementation.

■ The “invest” category will also contain older applications that have been well-
managed and constantly updated to maintain a good fitness through their life cycle,
or that have been migrated to an up-to-date application platform.

■ The applications in this category have a good business fitness, future potential and
no issues with information quality, timeliness or privacy.

■ They are able to keep pace with change to support dynamics and changing
requirements from the business. This may differ between applications: some will not
face a high pace of change; others have a high requirement for agility due to the
dynamics or uncertainty of the business capabilities they support.

■ The applications in this category have a medium-to-high technical fitness.

Applications are up to date, compliant with architecture and structured to be clearly
suitable for further investment, integration and reuse. Technical risk is acceptable in
quality areas like stability, security, maintainability and supportability.

■ Applications will begin in this category but may move to another category as their
fitness changes over time due to business context changes, aging technology and
technical debt accumulation.

■ In pace layer terms, this category will hold mostly systems of differentiation and
systems of innovation, as well as newer and well-managed systems of record.

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 Recommendations

■ From a portfolio perspective, these applications need to be preserved. Look to these

systems as future strategic platforms, and identify ways to further improve their
agility and efficiency.

■ Manage these applications as important business assets. Invest in and evolve them
to keep them in shape and improve their effectiveness. Enhancements in this
category are encouraged. Priority will be driven by the potential to increase value,
and to increase an application’s leverage or use in the enterprise.

■ Keep a close watch on the agility of the application to see if it can keep pace with
change. If it can’t, the application will not be able to support new business
requirements in time and business fitness will quickly deteriorate. Exploit agile,
DevOps and product-oriented delivery models to improve the agility of the
application (see “Applications 2024: How Application Leaders Should Prepare Their
Organizations to Remain Relevant and Highly Effective”)

■ Look to improve the efficiency of operations and maintenance if an application has

a high cost profile. If costs are not acceptable to the business, explore ways to
standardize and eliminate customizations to lower the application’s footprint.

Migrate — Modernize
Applications in the “migrate” category have a low-to-medium technical fitness and a
medium-to-high business fitness. They are valuable business assets and need immediate
attention in the form of technical remediation or migration programs to preserve business
value and reduce risk.

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 Characteristics

■ Applications in this category have a good business fitness, but have issues in the
technical domain. They pose a risk or have quality issues in areas like stability,
security, maintainability and supportability. Or they are not aligned with the
architectural direction.

■ The low-to-medium technical fitness can be caused by the use of old or unsupported
technology, lack of skilled workers, high complexity or high technical debt.

■ A high cost profile can point to a need for high care and maintenance. Complexity
and technical debt might result in high cost and risk with each change.

■ All types of application can end up in this category, and not just because they are
based on old technology. Badly architected applications or badly structured code
can be the cause. In some areas, the technology progresses so rapidly that
application stacks used to develop applications just a few years previously are now
considered “legacy” (e.g., mobile applications). In other cases, support for
application stacks or products has been ended by their vendors unexpectedly.

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 Recommendations

■ Applications in the “migrate” category are valuable business assets and need
immediate attention in the form of technical remediation or migration programs to
preserve their business value and reduce risk.

■ Use the TIME analysis to convince the business that if it wants to spend money
improving functionality, then at the same time the technical stack and/or the
packaged application should be updated to current release.

■ Use a risk-based approach to prioritize any migrate opportunities. Other factors that
can be used in prioritization include the cost profile of an application and the role it
plays in the competitiveness of the organization (in pace layer terms — systems of
differentiation and systems of innovation).

■ Initiatives in this category are largely aimed at reducing risk and cost. Detailed,
bottom-up analysis of application dependencies needs to be undertaken, along with
assessment of potential consolidation, conversion, modernization and migration
techniques.

■ In situations where a variety of transformation alternatives exist with differing costs,

risks and timelines will be common. Application leaders have a choice of
modernization approaches that improve particular aspects of technical fitness like
rehost, replatform, refactor and rearchitect. Choose the modernization approach that
tackles the root cause of the problem (see “Choose the Right Approach to Modernize
Your Legacy Systems”).

■ Applications in this category have a good business fitness. Replacing them may not
be the best option, as it is better to preserve the fitness and value of the applications
and avoid the disruption for the business to adopt something new.

Eliminate — Replace, Consolidate

Applications in the “eliminate” category have a low-to-medium technical fitness and a low-
to-medium business fitness. The goal is to decommission them, but business
dependencies and dependencies with other systems need to be resolved first.

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 Characteristics

■ Applications in this category are the “rotten apples” in the portfolio. Low business
and technical fitness beg the question: “Why do we keep these applications alive,
especially if they have a high cost profile?”

■ Low fitness does not mean that an application is obsolete. Business and other
systems might still rely on (part of) its functions and data. Applications in this
category often have elements that have to be replaced, migrated or consolidated.

■ Eliminating applications might seem a simple exercise, but this is rarely the case. It
can be challenging when the situation gets political and different stakeholders
become confrontational. However, the value of APM and rationalization are more
obvious here. Opportunities in the “eliminate” category have the highest chance of
success, as both business and IT will have concerns and issues about eliminating
these application assets, but will ultimately find common ground.

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 Recommendations

■ The primary response and initial recommendation for application leaders is to

decommission applications that fall into this category. The question is: “Can we?”
Analysis is required to understand who and what is dependent on the application.
These dependencies need to be resolved first.

■ Challenge any request for functional enhancements with a recommendation to

replace the application instead.

■ Relevant data and functions must be swapped onto another (overlapping)

application. If no alternate application exists, then something new must be created.
Data, users and active integrations must be migrated to the other application. Only
when that has happened can the actual decommissioning start.

■ Make IT and business stakeholders aware of the risk and issues associated with
applications in this category. Eliminating an application is not an IT initiative; the
business must be able and willing to support the change. Dependencies and data
retention needs must be clear and dealt with.

■ Some deeper analysis can be helpful to identify the most urgent opportunities.
Issues in areas like security, compliance and vendor support will pose a business risk
and can be decisive factors to motivate all stakeholders to take action.

■ A portfolio can have tens or hundreds of applications in this category, and due to
aging of other applications, that number will increase. Create the role of “application
undertaker” as an ongoing discipline to decommission applications and deal with
data retention in an efficient way. Standards covering processes, policies and tools
will make the process efficient and compliant. See “Decommissioning Applications:
The Emerging Role of the Application Undertaker” and “There Are Many Options for
Managing Data After Application Decommissioning.”

Engage and Involve Business Stakeholders by Discussing the TIME Model,

and Jointly Identify and Prioritize Improvement Opportunities
The TIME model gives a good illustration of the overall health of the portfolio and of the
position — and health — of individual applications. At a glance, it provides much more
information than an application inventory with many data points.

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 The TIME model is an important instrument in discussions with both IT and business
stakeholders to identify and prioritize opportunities for improvement. Business
stakeholders often see the application portfolio as an IT problem and adopt the position
of, “It’s your mess, you solve it!” But the irony is that IT cannot solve this problem alone. IT
needs the consent of, and support from, the business to make any meaningful change to
the application portfolio. The TIME model is a great tool to make all stakeholders aware
of the problem. Application leaders and business stakeholders should start by building a
sense of joint ownership and making a joint decision (see also “In Application
Rationalization, the Number of Applications Is Irrelevant”).

Using the TIME model in your discussions with business stakeholders also helps answer
the funding question. Initiatives to improve the application portfolio compete for budget
with projects for new applications or products. With all cards on the table, an informed
business decision can be made to invest in improving the applications’ assets.

The scope of the TIME model should be relevant to the business stakeholders to show
their part of the application portfolio. The discussion should take the business context
into account:

■ What are the business priorities?

■ How do they map to the application portfolio?

■ Where are the gaps?

Typically, the TIME model is created for a business domain. For example, you should have
a TIME model for all finance applications to show to the VP of finance with the message:
“These are your applications. You are depending on these assets and this is their health.
Can we talk about how to improve them?”

Once the top opportunities for improvement have been selected and agreed on by all
stakeholders, further analysis can be conducted for those selected applications so that
everyone understands the issues and their cause. An action plan can then be devised.
Restricting the scope of the detailed assessments to the selected applications reduces the
overall cost and time of arriving at the recommended set of actions.

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 Support Continuous Improvement of the Application Portfolio by
Assessing the Portfolio Regularly
Application portfolio management (APM) must be an ongoing discipline (see
“Managing a Portfolio of Applications Demands More Than Application
Portfolio Management”). Applications age, while their business and technical fitness
change over time, as do delivery models (e.g., cloud, XaaS). Improvement initiatives will
reshape the portfolio. Changes in business context, vendor product strategies, skills
availability and the introduction of new technology will impact the health of the portfolio.
As a result, applications will move around in the TIME model, shifting between categories.

Assess the application portfolio on a regular basis. Preserve the value of the process and
inventory by refreshing the data and revisiting assumptions. Revisit reviews not only when
internal factors change, but also when business conditions or other external events
impact the costs, the risks or fitness of the elements in the portfolio. These assessments
should be revisited on at least a yearly basis, but quarterly reassessment enables a faster
response to changing circumstances, and so should be preferred for domains where the
business and/or technology are changing rapidly.

Regular assessments will show to all stakeholders the changes and progress made in the
portfolio, and will prove the value of the APM process. Assessments will also help to
retain awareness and a sense of ownership among all stakeholders, making them better
asset owners and managers. In a continuously managed portfolio, the shifts between
categories can be predicted and managed. The visibility of application costs and risks will
also generally improve the credibility of IT’s plans.

Good agile development teams and product managers implicitly care about the health of
the applications and products they maintain and operate. Common agile practices like
continuous feedback, user satisfaction surveys and technical debt reduction keep a
constant focus on application and product health. Still, a regular portfolio assessment
and TIME model of a set of related applications and products will help to identify health
issues early on, so that drastic improvement measures like retirement and replacement
can be identified and discussed.

Document Revision History

Using TIME for Application and Product Portfolio Triage: Data From the Field - 4 October
2021

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 Recommended by the Authors
Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.

Managing a Portfolio of Applications Demands More Than Application Portfolio

Management
How to Assess Your Application and Product Portfolio for Business and Technical Fitness
Toolkit: Application Portfolio Business and Technical Fitness Assessment
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Engage the Business by Developing an Application Strategy Together
What Is Gartner's Pace-Layered Application Strategy and Why Should You Use It?

Business Outcomes Are the Milestones on an Application Strategy Roadmap

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