According to McKinsey & Company, organizations that are data-driven are twice as likely to be more profitable than industry average. This is one of many reasons why executives across the world rely heavily on a suite of analytical dashboards.

Could you imagine a CFO reporting results to Wall Street based on what sales managers ‘think’ they sold in the last quarter? Or a COO deciding which office locations to merge based on guestimates of employee numbers? That’s how many technology leaders must make decisions about their software estates today.

It’s time for technology executives to get their own fact-based dashboard. It’s time for them to have an application ‘control tower.’

C-level dashboards for decision-making

Most current dashboards for tech leaders have two drawbacks:

They cover primarily hardware and infrastructure monitoring, not software --the brains of the enterprise.
If they are focused on software, they are usually based on subjective, survey-based inputs.

How are technology leaders supposed to make data-driven decisions about their software like their peers?

CIOs and CTOs may have fact-based analytical tools for monitoring their IT infrastructure. Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools that report on the real-time operations of their technology are one example. But these systems don’t understand the software itself.

Enterprise Architects (EAs) have Enterprise Architecture and/or Application Portfolio Management (the other APM) tools designed for this purpose. But the inputs to these systems also come from application owners completing surveys based on their subjective knowledge and what developers tell them.

Last, the traditional tools that analyze software application source code to produce fact-based data are code quality tools designed for developers, not CIOs making strategic decisions and reporting to the board.

The application control tower – fact-based insight across the software estate

CAST Highlight is designed with software leaders in mind – delivering hard facts to steer and report on strategic imperatives like cloud, tech debt, compliance, and costs. It acts like an application ‘control tower’ by automatically analyzing application source code and producing fact-based insights across four categories:

Software Health (technical debt, resiliency, agility)
Cloud Maturity
Software Composition (open source risks)
Green Impact

It delivers executive-level views across an entire software estate tailored to the roles of software leaders. With automated recommendations and instant drilldowns to the application level, leaders can rapidly understand the detailed data driving these insights. The result is data-driven decision making (just like their C-suite peers) on initiatives such as:

Technical debt reduction
Application rationalization
Cost optimization
Cloud migration and optimization
Open source risk control and compliance
Sustainability

In the Autumn 2024 product release of CAST Highlight, several innovations have been introduced to help software leaders get the insights they need instantly. A series of new Role-based dashboards are available tailored to give various roles (CIOs, CISOs, Cloud Architects, etc.) the insights that matter most to them as soon as they login.

Monthly digest emails now deliver the latest insights across the software estate directly to executive inboxes with the ability to click through immediately to the details in CAST Highlight.

The new Portfolio Advisor for VMware Departure enables leaders to automatically build a roadmap for migrating applications from VMware virtual machines to the ideal cloud-based alternative.

These are just a few examples of the intelligence designed specifically for software leaders to help them make data-driven decisions, just like their C-suite peers.

See all the innovations included in the latest release of CAST Highlight here.