With the start of 2024, Enterprise Architects (EAs) should take a fresh look at the application portfolio and ensure that risks are addressed, costs are minimized, and capabilities are aligned with the business. Applications nearing end of life with no plans on replacement can leave the business in jeopardy. Applications that are redundant can cost an organization money. Infrastructure that doesn’t align with strategy and business goals lead to wasted spend.
To address these issues, EAs need a comprehensive system that allows them to view, manage, and address these challenges. EAs also need to integrate their plans into an enterprise wide roadmap that aligns with company goals and strategy. By incorporating plans, initiatives can be ranked and resources applied so the initiatives can be accurately sourced and delivered.
ServiceNow Application Portfolio Management (APM) Washington and store release offers new capabilities to help EAs reduce risk, minimize cost, and align with the business. A new application total cost of ownership (TCO) feature enables EAs to ingest cost data from internal or external source to help rationalize the application portfolio. A prior release of APM included technology reference model (TRM) for software and with the Washington release, APM further enhances TRM for hardware to enforce hardware standards to reduce risk to the business. Gantt charts make planning easy. And with new gantt charts for TRM and technology portfolio management (TPM), real-time, proactive management of risk is simple.
Application Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Management
Enterprise Architects gain direct access to application Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) data within the Enterprise Architecture Workspace, enabling efficient application rationalization, data-driven scoring, and TCO data visualization
- Optimize portfolio by conducting application TCO rationalization at both business application and business capability levels
- Leverage APM application TCO dashboard to efficiently visualize cost data and align with stakeholders
- Ingest 3rd party vendor costs or import your own cost data to automatically calculate TCO scores
- View cost data details such as cost, cost type, fiscal period, billing date, vendor, and source of the data
- View overall TCO cost of current and previous quarters and yearly trend with ability to drill-down to list of business applications
Technology Reference Model for Hardware
Establish and enforce hardware standards complementary with software standards, streamline requests and approval process of new hardware standards, and gain real-time insights into technical debt, all within a unified EA workspace
- Maintain and communicate internal technology standards on hardware to ensure compliance
- Track technical debt across the entire application portfolio to minimize risk and provide recommendations
- Provide internal hardware standards to hardware asset managers in Hardware Asset Workspace for a seamless and intuitive experience
Gantt Charts for technology reference model (TRM) and technology portfolio management (TPM)
Proactively mitigate risk and enhance governance by leveraging gantt charts to visualize technical risk
- Reduce risk and enhance collaboration by visualizing both TPM technology lifecycle risk and TRM technical debt
- Make data-driven application investment decisions based on both TPM technology lifecycles and TRM phases
- Rationalize applications efficiently based on technical risk to the business
- Provide real-time, holistic visualization of technical risk and debt within the EA Workspace
Business Capability Lens
Enterprise Architects can now a create portfolio of business capabilities, sub-capabilities, applications, and related planning items from within the Strategic Planning Workspace or from the Enterprise Architecture Workspace to strategically manage their business applications
- Users who have both SPM Pro and APM can create a portfolio using the new Business Capability lens
- APM users can quickly access a roadmap of their Business Capability hierarchy from within the Enterprise Architecture Workspace
Application Portfolio Management and Apptio Integration
Read about the benefits of reducing cost to the business with the Apptio and ServiceNow Application Portfolio Management integration.
For more information, review the release notes, then schedule a meeting and demo with your account team, or contact us here.
To learn more about these features, check out the Application Portfolio Management blog.
For more information on Application Portfolio Management, visit the product page.
Download these features in the ServiceNow store.
