Definition

The Business Impact Index measures the criticality of an application for your business. The index is derived from specific online survey questions concerning application impact on the business. These questions capture key data points such as: number of major releases; volume of end users; and impact of application failure on revenue loss. CAST Highlight applies these data to plot a value profile of your portfolio to help you understand which applications are driving a business.

The main drivers of the business impact are:

Application failure impact: Impacts of an application failure that could lead to service disruption, loss of revenue or business opportunity, loss of customer confidence and harm of the company’s public image

Application audience: Number and typology of end-users (external, internal or both)

Software effort: The number of major releases and associated development and maintenance effort

The questions that feed the business impact computation are:

• Could failure of this application lead to disruption?
• Could failure of this application lead to loss of revenue or business opportunity?
• Could failure of this application lead to harm to the company’s public image?
• Could failure of this application lead to loss of customer confidence?
• Does the application serve internal or external users?
• What is the approximate number of end users?
• Is this application in line with the company’s future technology direction?
• The average number of people (FTE) that worked on the code over the last 12 months?
• The number of major releases delivered over the last 12 months?

Computation & Customization

To compute the Business Impact of a given application, the application owner answers a survey for which each answer has a different weight. The business impact index is the weighted average of these answers.

Weights can be customized for a portfolio so that all applications will be consistently assessed the same way within an organization.