After assessing your first SAP LeanIX reports and gaining initial insights into your current IT landscape, you can now consider your first TIME assessment. This will help you identify your first candidate for potential elimination, allowing you to save costs and invest innovations.
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TIME Assessment
Gartner's TIME framework is a methodology used in enterprise architecture management to assess an organization's application portfolio. TIME stands for Tolerate, Invest, Migrate, and Eliminate. It categorizes applications based on their strategic value and the effort required to manage them effectively. The TIME classification helps in assessing and prioritizing applications for rationalization and modernization initiatives:
In SAP LeanIX, the TIME classification for applications is based on the Functional Fit and Technical Fit assessment of the applications
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| Tolerate | Applications that don't provide the best business value but have an important function and high IT quality. Functional Fit: Unreasonable or Insufficient Technical Fit: Fully Appropriate or Adequate |
| Invest | Applications valuable to the business and warrant future investment. Functional Fit: Appropriate or Perfect Technical Fit: Fully Appropriate or Adequate |
| Migrate | Applications serving a business purpose in the IT landscape but creating problems, and therefore need to be migrated to improve function. Functional Fit: Appropriate or Perfect Technical Fit: Unreasonable or Inappropriate |
| Eliminate | Applications that perform poorly and are no longer aligned with business activities. Functional Fit: Unreasonable or Insufficient Technical Fit: Unreasonable or Inappropriate |
- Applications with a high Technical Fit but low Functional Fit will be Tolerated.
- Applications with a high Technical Fit and high Functional Fit will be Invested.
- Applications with a low Technical Fit and high Functional Fit will be Migrated.
- Applications with a low Technical Fit and low Functional Fit will be Elminated
- APPLY GARTNER'S TIME MODEL
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- Description:
Gartner's TIME framework is a methodology used in enterprise architecture management to assess an organization's application portfolio. It categorizes applications based on their strategic value and the effort required to manage them effectively. The TIME classification helps in assessing and prioritizing applications for rationalization and modernization initiatives.
Your task:Make your first decision on TIME according to the business criticality of one application.
Metrics:To ensure proper data setup, we recommend orienting yourself on these best-practice metrics:
- Take eliminate decisions for min. one application
How to do thisNote
During onboarding, a comprehensive TIME assessment is not required. Focusing on one applications aims to maintain simplicity, achieve initial tangible benefits, and set the groundwork for further assessments.- Make sure all your applications have their functional and technical fit attributes assessed and stored.
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You already completed this step earlier in your onboarding journey with the help of you stakeholders while collecting and adding applications to your workspace- In case you have not yet obtained this data, you can follow this documentation to learn how to leverage surveys to gather information on these two attributes from your stakeholders.
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HEADS UP: Please note that the next box explains detailed instructions on how to set up automations for TIME assessment. However, automations cannot be applied retroactively; they need to be configured before the input data (technical & functional fit) is collected. If you want to use the automation feature, please jump to the next section ( Use automations to trigger TIME classification) first and return to this one after the automation process is configured. - Once the information is stored, leverage the application portfolio report and use the following filters to discover the applications with low functional and technical fit.
- Application landscape report - settings - left property: functional fit; right property: technical fit - apply
- Based on the newly appeared symbols for each application shown in the report, you can now explore the applications with the lowest ratings on functional and technical fit (one start, one arrow)
- Open those applications and documented in the 'portfolio strategy' section of the fact sheet the TIME classification attribute as 'Eliminate' from the drop down.
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You can also use an automation process for this. To do so follow the time in the next box. - Apply the application portfolio report and use the setting for the following filtering:
- x-axis TIME classification
- y-axis: business criticality
- Based on the result take elimination decision for min one application with a more administrative service, instead of a business critical one
Hint
Again, remember to check your current state at your workspace dashboard.
- TIP: USE CALCULATIONS TO TRIGGER TIME CLASSIFICATION
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Calculations let you populate fact sheet fields based on values from other fields. Use calculation templates for common scenarios or configure your own to define custom logic.
With calculations, you don’t need third-party solutions to host code. However, this feature doesn't affect any custom code-based calculations that you host on external platforms.
As an admin user, you can manage calculations in the Calculations section of the admin area. Here, you can activate calculation templates based on common best practices and configure your own calculations to define custom logic.
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You have now configured Migrate for functional fit. To configure the entire TIME classification, duplicate the created automation and repeat the steps for all four dimensions (Tolerate, Invest, Eliminate, Migrate) for both functional fit and technical fit.
- CONGRATULATIONS
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You just completed your first TIME assessment!
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Depending on the duration of your EA maternity, you may want to make additional strategic decisions and further explore the TIME assessment. In this case, we recommend taking our documentation into consideration as well.