Align work with business goals to deliver product and services in a way that supports your strategic priorities. IT Business Management (ITBM) helps IT demonstrate value to the organization and rationalize investments to focus more on innovation. ITBM also helps transform the delivery of new products and services through lean execution methodologies.
IT Business Management helps you deliver what the business needs, when they need it.
IT Business Management makes it easy to anticipate critical business requirements, allocate resources, and evaluate the value of your portfolio. It also enables you to prioritize new requests and deliver products efficiently. Assess related top-level investments, and adapt to make adjustments on an ongoing basis. Manage strategic and operational work in one place and reduce bottlenecks to get to market faster.
ITBM helps you to align your IT investment and work with the organization's goals for better outcomes and respond more rapidly to change.
This picture gives an idea of what ITBM is:
1) Application Portfolio Management (APM) - With ServiceNow® Application Portfolio Management (APM), get visibility into your applications to manage costs, ensure alignment, and easily adapt to change.
2) Align work to goals and strategy to ensure you work on the right projects - Project Portfolio Management (PPM) manages your entire project life cycle from idea to execution across your technology and business portfolios. This comprehensive solution includes applications to help you manage your project portfolio, resources, demands, time cards, ideas, and agile delivery.
3) Engage employees for the next big idea, With Innovation Management, enable your employees to submit ideas for new products and features. Track and convert ideas to demands, projects, stories, and other SAFe work items to deliver business outcomes with speed and agility, all from one location.
4) Simplify your funding workflow - Enhanced and simplified processes for top-down and bottom-up funding makes it easier for you to request and allocate funds to investments.
5) Gain visibility into the software development life cycle - The ServiceNow® Agile Development and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) applications enable you to manage scrum, hybrid, or waterfall development efforts throughout the life cycle, from inception through testing and deployment.
Use the ServiceNow® Application Portfolio Management (APM) application to gain a comprehensive understanding of the applications used in your organization so you can identify redundancies, and decrease budgetary costs. By consolidating applications within the same business function, you can identify applications to modernize or upgrade. APM also helps you decide whether to invest, sustain, or replace applications based on the business need aligned towards the organization goal.
APM Process can be defined as following:
- Identify - this step involves taking inventory of the applications
- Measure - this step means measuring usage and cost of the applications identified in step 1
- Evaluate - In this step evaluation of usage and cost measured in step 2 is done to find out the importance of the application in question
- Decide - In this step decision to invest in app or decom the app is done.
- Take Action - In this step an actual action is taken of what is decided in Step 4
Technically APM process can also defined as following:
Discovery is the basis here. It captures information like the hosts, OS but does not form relationship between them. This kind of discovery is called horizontal discovery.
Please refer to the following articles that I have written that give details on discovery and service mapping.
ITOM Series 3 Article 1: Discovery Fundamentals
ITOM Series 3 : Discovery Fundamentals Article 2
ITOM Series 3 Article 3: Discovery Troubleshooting
Service Mapping on the other hand gives information in a top-town manner, which means it forms relationship for example among web server, app server and database server.
APM relates information captured using Discovery and Service Mapping to Business Application
Discovery process also servers as a basis of Software Asset Management. Discovered software models are compared with base software models, and reconciliation process makes a comparison of discovered software assets with entitlements.
Please refer to the following detailed articles.
ITOM Series 3 Article 3: Discovery and Software Normalization
ITOM Series 3 Article 4: Software Reconciliation against Entitlements
ITOM Series 4 Article 5: CMDB Identification Rules And Discovery
Technology Portfolio Management
The underlying technologies of the business applications used in your business enterprise have a shelf life that must be actively managed and diligently monitored to track their versions and lifecycle. Use the timeline view of the Technology Portfolio Management to track their dates and thereafter create a demand or a project to upgrade or retire them.
The technology of a business application is also known as a software model. A software model is a specific version or configuration of a software.
The software models used in your business applications can be operating systems, database management systems, development tools, and middleware, each of which has a lifecycle. If these lifecycle stages are not tracked, there are risks where the vendor may not support them any longer and the business applications that run on these technologies are at stake.
Application Service Software Model [sn_apm_tpm_service_software_model]Stores the software models (technologies) underlying each application service.
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