Gartner TIME methodology

The Gartner TIME methodology is the best-practice methodology for enterprise architects carrying out an application rationalization initiative.

Tolerate

Invest

Migrate

Eliminate

The Gartner TIME methodology remains an essential part of any application rationalization initiative. The model involves deciding what to do with each application by assigning it to one of four categories:

1. Tolerate

2. Invest

3. Migrate

4. Eliminate

Before we apply Gartner TIME Methodology, we should be maintaining & tracking in Enterprise Tool like Prolaborate or LeanIX below enterprise assets

1. EA Inventory

2. Aplication Inventory

3. Business Capabilities

4. Application map to Business capabilities

5. Organization Mapping to Business Capabilities

6. Application map-Technology map

The TIME model focuses on assessing all of the applications used within your organization in terms of their technical fit for your environment and functional fit for your business.

In the model, technical fit refers to applications that have:

• good service levels

• low risk

• maintainability

• a lack of reliance on application experts

• information quality and format

• architecture alignment

• etc

Business value, of course, equates to how the application maps to your business capabilities and needs.

Gartner TIME methodology will place all their organization's applications into a matrix comparing technical to functional fit, as follows:

- Applications with high technical fit, but low functional fit will be Tolerated

- Applications with high technical fit and high functional fit will be Invested

- Applications with low technical fit and high functional fit will be Migrated

- Applications with low technical fit and low functional fit will be Eliminated

Before you undergo any application rationalization process, you should first gain a clear overview of your application portfolio.

Tolerate - accept the application in its current state for the time being

Invest - prioritize gaining maximum value from this high-priority application

Migrate - work on finding a better application to fulfill this need

Eliminate - remove the application as it is not needed or desirable

How we can deal such application with Tolerate Status.

1. Restrict Investment : Over a period of time , state may change. As long as it fulfill minor business needs, it need to be maintianed. To move it to Invest/Migrate, need better business case. If it becomes obsolence, it need to eliminated.

2. Monitor application incresed risk :

3. Look for other alternatives

4. Continuously reevaluate

Invest

Efficiency is gaining maximum value from the resources available to you. Therefore, when an application is producing a great deal of value, it becomes worthwhile to invest more resource into it to get even more value.

In application rationalization, you will spare resource by eliminating or optimizing spend on applications that aren't creating value. This can then be invested in improving the applications that are supporting business processes.

Invest category is related to cutting net costs overall and putting money for the business value.

Invest category in the Gartner TIME framework includes applications that have high technical and great functional fit to the business. This means that these applications are necessary to support essential business goals and are doing a good job of it.

Technical fit means Invest applications have:

• good service levels

• full integration with your tech stack

• low risk

• vendor support

• open-source code

They also have high functional fit, meaning the applications map to your business needs and capabilities.

Essentially, your Invest applications are premium applications that you use every day and support your business. Investing in these applications means increasing the daily efficiency of workers across your organization.

Gartner TIME framework suggests you stick with your high-value Invest applications.

However, to maintain this value, you will want to support these applications fully and look for ways to leverage them further. For your Invest applications, you should plan to:

1. Support Investment

Where there are ways to Invest in your applications, it's worth doing so wherever there is a business case. Maintaining and increasing the capabilities of a valuable application should be a no-brainer.

2. Expand And Innovate

Add extra licenses to ensure everyone who can benefit from the application within your organization has access to it. You should also look to apply the application to new use cases and work to discover innovative ways to leverage it.

3. Encourage Full Usage

There may be holdouts within your organization who still aren't using the high-value application in question. Work on increasing awareness of the value of the application and offering training to incentivize use.

Migrate

This third category provides a strategy for replacing applications that aren't supporting your business needs to the level that you need them to.

As such, as soon as you start looking at replacing a low technical fit application with a best-of-breed solution, you would almost always look at application modernization and cloud migration.

Modern cloud applications:

• will be supported for a longer period of time

• tend to be more open-source

• often have simpler to use interfaces and may offer no-code solutions

• are made up of micro-services

• will generally be hosted in an affordable way

Eliminate

This is, of course, what most enterprise architects are intending to do when they begin application rationalization, and is perhaps the only one of the four categories that is purely about cost reduction, rather than efficiency.

It is also the most challenging category. Removing the wrong application from your portfolio could send your tech stack plummeting down like a house of cards.