Portfolio management is not just for the business
APM is the integrated management of an organization’s digital assets, and it’s a game changer. When you have a centralized view of all the applications and services that exist in your organization you can immediately deliver significant improvements in cost control, risk management and strategic alignment.
You can retire your outlying, obsolete and unsupported applications. You can better understand and support business-critical services through full lifecycle management and succession planning. And you can better align your IT budget to those investments that will actually drive business value. It takes time and effort to get to this point, but it’s not as difficult as you think.
APM as a driver of strategy
The first step is to create an integrated, automated, central repository for all of your digital assets. Once you have your complete inventory you can analyze that inventory and determine where your threats and opportunities exist. With that analysis complete you can start to roadmap your strategies. Which applications need to be removed and how quickly? Where are the opportunities for rationalization? Or modernization? Where are the barriers to innovative business growth, and how can they be removed?
With this level of insight, you can truly begin to manage your digital assets as a portfolio – prioritizing investments to optimize value and evolving from a department that supports the business, to a department that is an extension of the business. This allows partnering to advance the strategic success of the entire organization. You then can build the foundation needed to deliver effective digital transformation.
Digital transformation is not about technology, it’s about new ways of working enabled by technology. Unless the portfolio of digital assets is tightly integrated with the business functions those assets support, that transformation can never be optimized. But when technology and business are tightly connected as part of how business gets done – the sky’s the limit.
ServiceNow wants to help you reach for those skies, which is why we are presenting a webinar on APM on November 17th (10 am PDT / 1 pm EST). Global thought leader Andy Jordan will join ServiceNow’s own Al Hsu to help you get a head start on your APM journey. Register Here. Also, please listen to our recent podcast where Al Hsu and Andy Jordan discuss the value and importance of Application Portfolio Management.
