A strategic approach to technology portfolio management

[Lilly Souksamla]

Application portfolio management or APM has become an important practice for high performing organizations in recent years.  As the name suggests, it’s a strategic, portfolio driven approach to managing business applications – the software that collectively enables all business functions to perform.  It involves understanding this inventory of digital assets, mapping those assets to the organization’s business capabilities, and managing the portfolio with accurate, complete, up to date data. 

The benefits of APM are considerable.  Visibility into outdated, redundant, obsolete or abandoned business applications allows organizations to eliminate the costs of those solutions, also reducing the risk exposure of the business.  Understanding the inventory also allows for better lifecycle management, including end of life and replacement, further reducing risks while helping to ensure that all applications are aligned with required business capabilities. 

APM also helps align technology and business investments.  APM helps IT leaders to not only plan to support the business priorities today, but also the direction the business is heading in.  That can be demonstrated not just in current investment strategies, but in the creation of technology roadmaps that align with the organization’s strategic roadmaps and demonstrate how the business and technology landscapes are evolving as an integrated whole. 

In this series of blog posts, we’re going to explore the various elements of APM in more detail, showing you how you can identify, assess, plan, and execute on a technology management strategy that enables business results.  We’ll look at how APM helps improve a number of technology and business elements, we’ll provide best practices to help you optimize the management of your digital assets, and we’ll show you how APM integrates with the rest of the key business priorities today through its alignment with Servicenow Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM). 

The aim is to move APM from an abstract concept to a tangible tool that you can use to improve the management of your digital assets, and better align technology and business investments.  Of course, to do that, you need more than theory, and that’s where ServiceNow Application Portfolio Management solution comes in.  As the only solution that offers all of our capabilities on a single, integrated platform – the Now Platform, we offer you a unique opportunity to not only accelerate your decision making while reducing costs and risks, but to integrate those decisions across the entire enterprise. 

With ServiceNow, technology leaders are also business leaders, seamlessly integrating business and technology planning and execution.  Business partners understand how IT is supporting their priorities, and technology teams understand how their work is contributing to organizational success.  With APM helping to guide everything, all stakeholders have confidence that the investments and work being carried out are optimizing performance, minimizing costs, and alleviating risks – in less time and with greater confidence. 

See the next blog in our series here.

Previous blog is here.

Learn more about Application Portfolio Management here

Learn more about Strategic Portfolio Management here