Optimize Long-Term Application Effectiveness And Value

Firms invest millions in application software — money that they might otherwise invest in new sales and distribution partnerships or new plants and machinery. Traditional arguments about compliance or efficiency are far too woolly to justify heavy investment in applications when there are so many other attractive options for investing scarce capital. In the age of the customer, application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals must demonstrate that their business applications, deployments, and governance contribute to their company's success; to do this, they need metrics to compare their performance with market best practices. This report describes metrics that AD&D pros should use to benchmark their performance: judging application portfolio fit and engagement as a proxy for alignment with business strategy and assessing agility and business impact. It also provides scores for each metric that other AD&D pros consider to be good, median, and poor for each industry classification. This report is an update to the report originally published on April 11, 2014; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy. Forrester believes that the 2014 data is still relevant so we have not updated it.