Application Portfolio Management: Do you understand what you have?

[Lilly Souksamla]

In the last blog we looked at the inventory of digital assets as the foundation of your application portfolio management (APM) work. Building and maintaining a complete and accurate inventory is the requirement for all other APM elements. But it is only that first step, it’s not enough on its own. 

Once you know all the applications that you have, along with key characteristics of those applications, it’s time to analyze the portfolio to understand the overall landscape and begin planning for changes. That analysis needs to consider a number of different aspects: 

• Business capability planning to understand how well technology currently aligns with existing business capabilities and how it needs to evolve to support the strategic priorities of the organization around those capabilities. 
• Application migration and rationalization to develop plans for the elimination of redundant and outdated systems, the move to service- or cloud-based solutions, etc. 
• Technology risk management to understand where the organization is currently exposed to high levels of technology risk and allow for the development of mitigation plans. Also, to improve awareness of risk exposure and management requirements across the portfolio of applications. 
• Information usage to understand the relationships and information flow across applications as well as the alignment of those applications to business functions. 

When an organization’s enterprise architects are able to understand each of these elements, both individually, and collectively, they are able to develop prioritized plans to not only improve the application portfolio, but also the strategic portfolio of investments. The results of this analysis enable insight into where investments are going to have the most impact, how best to balance growth with stability and security, and so on. 

Of course, the ability to perform this level of analysis depends on the tool. ServiceNow’s APM solution supports each of these levels of analysis, providing multiple ways to present the results in intuitive, easy to interpret ways. This means that the solution not only acts as a powerful analysis tool, but also as a communication vehicle that allows the results of the analysis to be presented to all stakeholder groups in a way that makes sense to them. 

Additionally, because ServiceNow APM operates as part of the Now Platform, the results of the analysis can directly feed the planning work that will create and prioritize the investments that will execute on the necessary enhancements. This strengthens the relationship between all enterprise functions, helping to ensure that the entire organization is focused on the same priorities, executing work in support of the goals and objectives and continuously delivering optimal performance. 

Of course, today’s optimal strategy is tomorrow’s outdated plan. In the next entry we’ll look at how APM supports an organization’s continuous and adaptive approach to planning – maintaining that alignment between business and technology in a rapidly evolving world. 

View the next series in our blog here.

Previous blog is here.

Learn more about Application Portfolio Management here