Applications review
An in-depth assessment of your enterprise systems environment to help you target investment and deliver a digital vision.
About applications review
As a research and education organisation, your IT systems need to support your plans for the future, and business-critical software is a key part of the picture.
Whether you want to improve the student experience, get more from your technology investment or plan a move to the cloud, assessing your existing systems is an important step.
To give you the detailed view you need, we help you build a detailed view of your software, ranging from student records systems to finance, HR or marketing applications. This helps you target future planning in full knowledge of your current position.
Benefits to your organisation
Deliver your digital vision
Many organisations have a vision of a flexible, cloud-based software environment – relying more on software as a service (SaaS) and shared services, and less on legacy systems that may need regular updates or even demand specialist in-house expertise. First, it’s important to assess the enterprise applications you currently rely on so you can target digital investment to meet both financial and operational goals.
Get the best value for money
We seek to understand what you are paying for software (including licensing and support costs) and the value you get from it. This includes an understanding of how the software is used, its useful life, and how it interoperates with other critical systems.
If you need a more detailed, invoice-level review of costs, we offer a financial X-ray service.
Understand the needs of stakeholders
We'll talk to senior IT staff and other stakeholders to develop a picture of the perceived issues and difficulties you face with applications as an organisation as a whole.
Explore future options
At the end of the review we will provide a report with independent recommendations for next steps, pointing you to Jisc members who run various solutions and signposting Jisc services and frameworks.
This applications review doesn’t take place in isolation. It’s designed to follow on from the Jisc infrastructure review, a wide-ranging assessment of your infrastructure, systems and processes – so you can see how your applications environment fits into your overall digital infrastructure, as you plan for the future.
How this service works
This is a bespoke consultancy service, available as a follow-on service to the infrastructure review.
As part of the service, we would typically:
- Seek an initial meeting, which may be a conference call, to agree a scope
- Conduct a site visit in which subject specialists meet with an agreed list of stakeholders, to discuss the applications they administer and use
- Present a report, including summaries of our observations and impartial recommendations for next steps