Application Portfolio Management: start with inventory analysis

[Lilly Souksamla]

As we begin our exploration of application portfolio management (APM), it’s logical to begin with the fundamentals.  For digital assets, that means developing an accurate and complete inventory of all applications within the organization.  This is rarely as straightforward as it should be.  

Most organizations are dealing with legacy applications that refuse to die – islands of non-integrated technology that live in a forgotten corner of a server room or under someone’s desk.  Shadow IT – technology that has been procured directly by functional departments without IT involvement has become an increasing problem in recent years.  And then there are those applications that everyone knows exist, but no one is really sure why. 

Then we have the redundant applications, the multiple versions, and the unsupported and obsolete applications.  To be fair, most organizations attempt to track this inventory, but they do it in spreadsheets that are inevitably full of errors, and are out of date before they are even completed.  That’s not inventory management. 

Effective application inventory management requires an integrated platform like ServiceNow’s APM product.  This allows not only for the capturing of inventory items, but the maintenance of that inventory in an automated fashion, without requiring manual updates every time something changes.  It also allows for management of data elements around your applications that actually inform you and drive better decisions.  Those elements might cover everything from ownership and purpose to IT Ops and security information. 

On its own, this inventory is simply a baseline, an accurate summary of your current state.  But it is also the starting point for your entire APM approach.  If you don’t know where you are today, then you can’t develop an effective plan to get you to where you need to be.  Without an understanding of where your application strengths, weaknesses and risks are, you can’t address them with any hope of success. 

That’s why building and managing your inventory is so critical.  You need to rely on the information in it, and that means you need to automate as much of that information gathering and maintenance as possible.  That’s where the power of the Now Platform comes in.  Adding our APM functionality to your IT operations management and IT service management is a natural fit.  Additionally, integrating security operations; governance, risk and compliance; and IT asset management adds more levels of insight, strengthening the power of your digital asset inventory. 

Once your inventory is in place, then it’s time to start understanding what you have.  That’s where the analysis element comes in, and that’s what we’ll look at in the next entry. 

Interested in learning more? Visit us online and find out how ServiceNow APM can help you plan for a new tomorrow.  

View the next series in our blog here.

Previous blog is here.

Learn more about Application Portfolio Management here

Learn more about Strategic Portfolio Management here