Last month our very own Matt Schvimmer posted a quick introduction on IT4IT and our suggestions on how to get started which can be found here. This next iteration is meant to dive deeper into the first value stream “Strategy to Portfolio”.
Also see our Requirement to Fulfill Blog here.
Strategy to Portfolio Defined
It’s not as complicated as it sounds, and it’s probably something most of you are already doing in some form or another. For IT organizations such as yours, Strategy to Portfolio starts with understanding the businesses strategy and objectives. Once you’ve defined this, it’s all about translating your business goals into IT technology and development investments that are realized by teams internally or sourced externally. Simply put, the IT4IT Strategy to Portfolio Value Stream addresses the IT planning activity and includes the functional components, reference architecture, data and integrations required to strategically plan within your IT organization more effectively.
4 big challenges in IT planning
- Today, lines are becoming increasingly blurry between business priorities and technology investments as businesses become more reliant on technology for their business models.
- Traditionally, disparate planning activities within an organization led to challenges in knowing what everyone was working on. Needless to say it’s usually unclear if everyone is aligned and working together on the most important business priorities.
- Planning across siloes requires data consistency and collaboration, two things that are rarely achievable at scale.
- Last but not least, IT organizations are predominantly caught in a reactive and defensive position vs. proactively being part of the business planning process.
These key challenges result in most organizations having an in-effective planning process that is not timely, efficient, or considerate of major factors such as current resources, governance, and operational needs. Additionally, many organizations find their struggles are amplified by the 'non-project' discretionary work that often goes unmonitored, unmanaged, and unaccounted for, becoming a serious threat in meeting the defined strategic goals that have been agreed upon.
IT4IT provides the IT organization the best hope in supporting what is actually keeping most technology leaders awake at night: gaining and maintaining strategic relevance with your business and accounting for all work IT performs. This is achieved by comparing the current IT organization and tooling with IT4IT to streamline activities, providing the organization a one-page view that recognizes all relevant planning concerns into one streamlined IT planning value-stream. The expected outcomes of Strategy to Portfolio ensures IT organization investments are completely in lock-step with business priorities.
Strategy to Portfolio Use Cases covered
To illustrate how well the IT4IT Strategy to Portfolio value stream addresses some of the most common, and sometime overlooked aspects of IT planning, here are a few observations that can be identified when you peer more closely at Strategy to Portfolio’s Level 2 Reference Architecture. While some of these are obvious and explicit, you may find others may have been overlooked entirely.
- Business Strategy directly influences the Demand queue to help shape IT demand priorities.
- Financial accountability is illustrated with a clear connection between IT budgets and corporate finance. There is also an explicit dependency in the Scope Agreement to leverage current assets and services.
- The Policy component ensures that demands recognize compliance and legal requirements and priorities.
- Demand processes are split into open-intake demand, and an additional Proposal functional component that tackles understanding what the demand scope, budget, and resources are available when considering prioritization trade-offs.
- Enterprise Architecture blends in with other Planning functions to help shape and scope transformations, ensuring longer-term strategic goals can be met.
While some activities may occur in your organization, it is much easier to understand everything you should consider as your organization evolves. It is also easier to understand how functions interact across the overall planning value stream, how they foster collaboration to achieve the efficient, effective planning outcomes expected by leadership.
Enabling the Strategy to Portfolio Value Stream using ServiceNow
There is a natural mapping between IT4IT and most of the ServiceNow product portfolio. This becomes apparent after you crack open the standard and dig in a bit deeper. Strategy to Portfolio for example maps almost entirely to the IT Business Management (ITBM) suite of applications, which contains ITFM, PPM, APM and Agile solutions. GRC maps to the IT4IT Policy functional component, and ServiceNow’s Service Portfolio Management within ITSM maps to Service Portfolio functional component completing the picture. While ServiceNow’s ITBM suite wasn’t created with IT4IT in mind, there is no mistake that ITBM suite which predominately focused on Planning use-cases, maps directly against the functional criteria found in Strategy to Portfolio.
Evolution at ServiceNow shows where we are increasing our alignment and coverage of the IT4IT standard. This is a good sign for our customers who want to see vendors embrace open standards. For example, the ITBM Financial Management product release in Kingston earlier this year now directly maps to three financial management use-cases represented in IT4IT V2.1 with IT Budgeting, Financial Planning, and Service Costing. Likewise, our new Continuous Service Improvement solution coming in our London release specifically focuses on understanding the operational needs for services and helps to prioritize these needs in Demand.
My personal perspective on Strategy to Portfolio is deeply related to the product I manage at ServiceNow; Application Portfolio Management. We are evolving APM into a full Enterprise Architecture scope, most notably in Kingston where we introduced a few exciting features;
- New Business Capabilities CI types
- Business Planning portal to capture business goals and objectives
- New Technology Portfolio Management to apply policies and governance over technology decisions
- Tighter integration between the APM function and Demand Management to help scope and realize future-states.
Over the first year and a half at ServiceNow, I discovered the level of integration between our products and shared data aligns very well with the IT4IT reference architecture, no other IT vendor can come close to making this claim. To better understand this coverage, internally we did a gap analysis study between our products, and the IT4IT functional criteria. After this process, we have been able to highlight numerous strengths (and admittedly some gaps) that we are currently using to shape our product investments and roadmap going forward; so, expect to see us close those minor gaps between the IT4IT standard and our product portfolio in the coming releases. For more information, check out this webinar I did in 2017 “How ServiceNow ITBM Supports IT Value Process Best Practices as Defined by IT4IT”.
ServiceNow as the Service Model Backbone
One last compelling aspect of how ServiceNow meets, and in some ways, exceeds the IT4T specification is how we support the Service Model Backbone. In the IT4IT Standard, the Service Model Backbone ensures that the service model is consistently managed from Strategy to Portfolio through Detect to Correct. Within IT4IT, these connections are implied to be made through a series of integrations between repositories used for the different value streams. At ServiceNow however, we combine all the repositories into one and forgo needing to integrate disparate repositories altogether. Instead of having to integrate semantically disparate systems, we added planning concepts to a common Enterprise CMDB used in across ALL value streams. There is no need for integrations, Planners always see accurate real-time operational data.
“…when I realized this was possible on the ServiceNow platform it was as compelling a moment when I first experienced a Smart Phone, a product we can no longer live without…”
Conclusion
The Strategy to Portfolio value-stream as implemented in ServiceNow presents a new era for planning, one that is interconnected, up-to-date and as real-time as you can find. This allows organizations to turn on a dime when market conditions and legal issues arise, portfolio funding changes, etc. creating a more agile organization that takes into account current practices in a new integrated manner. The pre-integrated products within the ServiceNow platform deliver the planning functionality required for IT to be in line with the IT4IT Standard, and deliver even greater value. For me personally, when I realized this was possible on the ServiceNow platform it was as compelling a moment when I first experienced a Smart Phone, a product most of us would agree we can no longer live without. If you have an planning role within IT, I believe you will have a similar epiphany when you realize what ServiceNow can do in the context of IT4IT, and the Strategy to Portfolio value stream.
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