The investment and operating expenditures for the desired operation – for example, the requirement of 99.99% system availability or less than one hour of downtime a year – are determined indirectly as negative consequences of the unavailability of the service, i.e., costs per hour of downtime. But this decoupling does not automatically derive the value of the application.

AII helps to create transparency in the interdependency among the individual performance factors and the organizational interdependencies. This can be done, to describe one example, by linking the acquisition and installation costs per system in ratio to the achieved level of availability. 

The definition of terms below clarifies the terms used in the context of application infrastructure intelligence:

IT infrastructure is the basis of all shared IT capabilities which other business systems use as a foundation, making it more than just a collection of servers, networks, and middleware or the securing of a source of cooling and power. On the contrary, the installed and operational software products and applications such as support systems, even enterprise systems, belong to the category of IT infrastructure. For this reason, we can speak of the application infrastructure as being synonymous with a crossover view of IT infrastructure.

Intelligence, when used in the context of AII, describes the capability of using links to filter out various views and information from a set of  data scattered over a number of locations. This type of data processing provides answers to ad hoc queries as needed without expending so much energy in the collection of data. Another objective of intelligence is the shaping of a flexible, future-oriented architecture for the provision of information. It should present a “single point of truth” with high data quality and an efficient, but flexible, metadata model. The management information systems known as business intelligence or data warehouses are examples of systems with this type of capability.

The classification of application systems according to business relevance assigns all of the existing, planned, and potential applications to four categories: strategic, high-potential, key operational, and support. This categorization is referred to a number of times below and is an aid for the broader topic of application portfolio management which includes AII.
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