Business applications’ effectiveness is crucial to an enterprise. It is important to understand the effectiveness of an application to determine whether to upgrade or replace the application. By using Forrester’s Balanced Scorecard, Application Development and Delivery (AD&D) professionals can assess the applications and improve customer experience and product innovation.

Forrester’s survey in 2016 found that software decision-makers in enterprises find updating or modernizing legacy business systems as a high priority. However, AD&D leaders believe their current business applications are holding them back. Forrester found that their clients struggled to prioritize improvement efforts. Many Forrester clients focus on keeping cost low even if that means providing obsolete software and they focus too much on the internal end users instead of the customers who are buying the products.

Forrester’s Balanced Scorecard provides a well-designed framework to assess the effectiveness of business applications. It should replace the “inside-out focus on cost and end-user satisfaction with a focus on support for the organization’s outside-in priorities…” Forrester provide AD&D leaders a template based on the ability to deliver four key elements; business outcomes, agility, health and service.

To deliver measurable value beyond the initial business case, make business KPIs the primary measure of effectiveness by measuring and assessing the most relevant KPIs for the application. Organizations should consider business stakeholders’ satisfaction level of current performance. Other ways to ensure KPIs as the primary measure is by comparing your application’s business KPI capabilities with leading competitors and engaging with the provider’s customer success function.

Proper assessment of an application’s fitness for the future (evaluating its ability to support innovative commercial models, rapid introduction of new products and services and easy modification of the application) is all part of the “agility” box in Forrester’s scorecard. According to Forrester’s Global Business Technographics Software Survey, “improved business agility is the top benefit expected from SaaS applications.”

Security is one of the major concerns of any consumer, so a healthy system is needed to meet customers’ expectations. To assess an applications’ health effectiveness, one should measure user adoption, system availability and the impact of outages and data security. The health of an application is one of the major concerns of consumers.

Finally, ensuring proper service by enabling employees to focus servicing customers. Organizations should measure the effectiveness of the service team by surveying end users’ opinions, persuade vendors to capture evidence of value delivered and comparing reactive support Service Level Agreements (SALs) against contracts.

By using Forrester’s Business Application’s Effectiveness Scorecard, an organization can ensure an application is effective and determine the best steps to for it to provide high effectiveness if it is not already at the peak level.