Application Portfolio Management
How can an international group of companies with sites and sales offices all over the world retain a clear picture of its application landscape? According to Altana Pharma, the answer is an Application Portfolio Management System (APMS). Together with Arcondis, Altana Pharma, a pharmaceutical research company, has developed a tool which acts as the central information system for all its business applications.
Applications from a business perspective
The database tool is a central information system for all the pharmaceutical company's business applications. It contains information about the functionality, software version, underlying IT systems and important hardware components of individual applications. It also records the links between the applications, so that interactions can be investigated from the perspective of the business processes. "This allows us to identify how we can optimize our data flow, for example by integrating new solutions, so that it provides the best possible support for the business process," says the strategic IT manager at Altana Pharma.
Which information should an APMS contain?
The system became necessary as a result of Altana Pharma's international growth. It was one of a number of measures which formed part of the company's international IT strategy. Its objective was to allow all the business applications used by the pharmaceutical company to be managed centrally and in a standardized way. The main problem in implementing the system was to identify which information was important and needed to be included in the system. Altana Pharma worked together with consultants from Arcondis to answer this question. Arcondis, a Swiss company specializing in IT management, acted as the general contractor with responsibility for the design of the APMS. The information to be included in the system was chosen on the basis of a standardized catalog.
Overview of all compliance-related applications
There was a particular emphasis on recording information about compliance-related applications, which have to fulfill legal and regulatory requirements. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) imposes regulations on pharmaceutical companies in the USA to ensure that their products are of high quality. These requirements have an impact on the corporate IT systems and are summarized using the term GxP compliance (which stands for good laboratory/clinical/manufacturing practices). In addition, company accounting systems are governed by the provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and these requirements also have to be implemented by the IT department. For this reason, Altana Pharma has included the attributes "GxP relevance" and "SOX relevance" in its APMS, which allows it to record the validation status of an application, in other words this is a check to ensure that a new application meets the regulatory requirements.
Graphical overview of interfaces
Users can display information about individual applications in one window. The information is grouped into the following categories: general information, organizational information, technical information, quality aspects, evaluation aspects and decision support. In order to give users an overview of the links between the applications, the APMS also offers a graphical display which shows at a glance the interfaces between the selected applications and other applications or IT systems.
Change management process
The Altana Pharma APMS currently holds details of more than 300 applications and is run by the company's central office in Constance in Germany. The CIO makes investment decisions on the basis of the analyses which the employees in the CIO's office run using the APMS.
Like any database solution, the APMS is only as good as its maintenance. If the data becomes obsolete, the system is almost worthless. For this reason, when the APMS was designed, database maintenance was integrated into Altana Pharma's change management process. This specifies what employees should do in the case of changes to systems, among other things. For the APMS this means that if there is any change to a business application it must be recorded in the system immediately.