How would you get a list of all the applications at your company?

Question

Hi Everyone,

(Updated: I've moved this over to ServerFault)

I'm responsible for maintaining a list of all the applications in my company (about 250). The range is from HR systems that track 80k employees, to manufacturing-type systems responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, to web applications with a small user base and not a lot of risk associated to them going down.

The technologies are mostly split between SAP, .Net, and Java, but we have legacy examples of just about everything else you can imagine.

The point of the list is to be able to manage risk and identify opportunities for improvement. For instance, when we find systems that are responsible for core business functionality that are written in clipper, we try to find some money to re-write them. We call the picture of the high-risk apps in the landscape the "heat map".

The list is pretty simple - It really just needs the name, description, ID, DB platform, App platform (ex, SAP, .Net, Java on Weblogic, Mainframe, etc), key interfaces, and key services.

Anyone have any experience building / maintaining a list like this? What should I keep in mind?

Cheers

KA

Answer 1

When in doubt use excel. At least to start out.

As you start to organize them, you will then see what types of organizational tools to use to improve your management. But it could very well end up being all you need.

Ideally you would want something automated so that your "master list" knows when a certain app is down. This may not be feasible with a lot of apps spread across different languages and platforms.