Great minds think alike - ServiceNow's APM and the views of a Thought Leader

[rickyb]

A recent article published on the web site APMdigest.com caught the attention of ServiceNow's Product Manager for Application Portfolio Management, Mark Bodman. Mark was pleased to see that a thought leader like Dennis Drogseth and he shared similar views and opinions. Mark shared with me that much of what Mr. Drogseth had talked about was actually being looked at for inclusion in Mark's product road map for APM.  

It didn't take much encouragement from me to get Mark to comment on Mr. Drogseth's article and after speaking directly with Mr. Drogseth he was more than happy to allow me to re-post his article along with Mark's comments. Below is the original article along with Mark Bodman's views inline…

APM and APM: When Two Acronyms Collide

By Dennis Drogseth with

Comments by Mark Bodman

According to most industry perceptions, application performance management (APM) and application portfolio management (APM) might seem to be worlds apart — or at best connected by a very thin thread. Much of this, admittedly, comes from application portfolio planning's roots in project and portfolio management, which lived in another realm and in my view in another era — when a cloistered development team got most of its go-ahead information from often equally cloistered business analysts. In other words, when the fertile dialog that's emerging between development, operations and ITSM teams was still in its infancy.

Mark Bodman: I couldn't agree with you more, Dennis.   The first Application Portfolio Management tools were born inside PPM product areas leaving them without ties to anything else but planning, so they languished and atrophied while more integrated solutions evolved in the marketplace.

In this blog, I'd like to highlight three areas that are bridging the APM-to-APM divide: digital experience management, application discovery and dependency mapping (ADDM), and agile/DevOps lifecycle planning.

Digital Experience Management

In my view, probably the single most important lane in our 3-lane bridge connecting the two APMs is digital or user experience management. Coincidentally, this is a technology area where I've witnessed another set of colliding acronyms — user experience management (UEM) and unified endpoint management(UEM), which also have at least a plank to unite them.

EMA's recent research revealed a striking connection between digital experience management and application portfolio planning right out of the gate. When asked, "Over the past three years, what has become more important for digital experience management?" application portfolio planning tied with application performance management for first place! If you're curious, agile, business development and customer management and cloud came next.

Mark Bodman: More than anything else, organizations need to make multi-faceted decisions when making investments.   With most organizations transforming to digital, user experience and feedback has taken a more significant role for deciding what applications need investment.   Making well rounded investments decisions is more important than ever, requiring many facets to be incorporated into the application portfolio so that each one; from cost, risk, customer satisfaction and many more, are considered in making investment decisions.  

Why was this just waiting to happen? Our data suggests that the answer lies in the fact that digital experience management embraces not only application performance, but also application outcomes and relevance. For instance, when we asked, "When you talk about digital experience management, what do you see bringing you the most value?" the answers in ranked order were:

1. 1. Business impact
2. 2. Performance
3. 3. Change management
4. 4. Design
5. 5. Productivity
6. 6. Usage

Mark Bodman: Platforms such as ServiceNow can help collect these facets without costly integrations and extra investments.   For example, change management metrics can be queried from the SerivceNow change management records to provide a precise and automated change detail.

Of these, business impact, design, productivity and usage all directly inform business RELEVANCE and VALUE. In other words, if you wanted to plan your application portfolio meaningfully, wouldn't you want to capitalize on these insights which are, by the way, dynamic, real-time, and can be trended to correlate with business performance overall?

But COST was also a factor. In fact, given the pressures on IT for transparency in the "age of cloud" cost has become increasingly central to IT executive planning. When we asked about business metrics applied to digital experience management, the top five were:

1. 1. Cost-related external SLAs with cloud and other service providers and partners
2. 2. Business activity management impacts
3. 3. Revenue-related impacts
4. 4. Business process impacts
5. 5. Service desk operational efficiencies

What you see is a sandwich — with two pieces of bread focused on cost (one and five) and the middle section (lettuce, cheese and ham?) squarely focused on value. All of these are relevant sources for meaningful application portfolio planning and management.

Mark Bodman: ServiceNow sees cost as critical, and has tackled this use case within the platform to provide a robust cost per application metric that can be leveraged natively as well.   Traditionally, costs were tracked externally, computed using a vague algorithm.   With the ServiceNow platform cost from all aspects of the application from software to infrastructure to support personnel can all be aggregated based on native data within the platform.   The more a customer leverages ServiceNow (i.e. creates data within the platform), the easier it is to perform informed APM planning exercises.

Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping

ADDM is really a bridge to many things. As you know, it can be central in understanding, prioritizing and resolving performance issues associated with application services by capturing application-to-infrastructure, as well as application-to-application, interdependencies. It is also an area of vast innovation in the industry, tied to multiple use cases with multiple product architectures and designs.

Two of the more prominent use cases for ADDM are change management and asset management. The latter is particularly relevant here because it connects business services with actual costs. Costs in terms of public cloud investments, on-premise hardware and software, and potentially even operational costs associated with everything from infrastructure management to software audits. In other words, ADDM can provide inestimable value in mapping the end products of IT (its application/business services) to all the associated costs surrounding the creation, delivery and support of those products.

Of course to do this, more than ADDM is required. More advanced investments in IT service management (ITSM), IT governance analytics, and more fluid approaches to IT asset management (ITAM) and software asset management (SAM) are needed to color in the picture. Best of all, though, once again, all this data is real (not just surmised), dynamic and current, and can be trended over time to capture historical insights into the real costs of managing an application business service.

Mark Bodman: I agree, ADDM is a core feature of the ServiceNow platform that we are taking advantage of in our Jakarta release (July 2017).   Just 6 months out of the gate, the ServiceNow APM solution is being augmented with a seamless integration that allows APM users to invoke discoveries and service mapping, and integrates seamlessly with the Software Asset Management (SAM) to specify what software assets are used per application.

Agile/DevOps Planning

On the one hand, linking application portfolio management to agile and DevOps should be a no-brainer. Pretty easy to figure that associated planning needs to be done before speedy execution. But I'm highlighting the connection here because the current focus on agile is all about speed, not about relevance. The truth is, as I like to say, you can "automate train wrecks." You can also, frankly, be "agile and dumb" —speedily doing enhancements that don't bring the most value at the cost to others that are far more relevant to business outcomes. So, I'd like to suggest a new brand for "agile" called "Informed Agile" — where APM truly meets APM.

In wrapping up, I'd like to add that I didn't mean these three lanes in the bridge between the two APMs to be complete or the last word. I'm sure there are other areas where APM meets APM, beyond these three. The very nature digital transformation, and the closely associated role of IT transformation, could add any number of layers, from SecOps requirements to advance IT analytics.

It seems to me that the time has already arrived for IT to look beyond traditional ways of working. The idea notion that business experts sit on one side of a wall, and IT professionals sit on the other now seems to belong to the past. That wall is crumbling, and the opportunity to have common conversation with common data points is finally emerging.

Mark Bodman: The down-stream processes that happen after evaluating applications, making the investment decisions and subsequently investing are executed by the agile teams who deliver on strategic requirements. The business context and criteria for the investment can be maintained as work on the ServiceNow platform is shuttled from planning to execution and finally operations where the performance management aspects of applications are tested.   The feedback loop for application teams is natively facilitated by the platform and the loop from desired state to actual state of the application can be tightly closed.   In my career, this feat is nearly impossible given the enormous disconnects between the planning, dev, and operations teams.   With platforms like ServiceNow removing the cost of integration and facilitating the entire value stream, there is no other solution that is better poised to help our customers realize the full potential of their digital investments.