question Application Category - Application Portfolio Managment in Architect forum

Application Category - Application Portfolio Managment

billhazelton — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 14:41:55 GMT

I am currently working on Application Portfolio Management and mapping applications to their business capabilities. It was suggested that I use Application Category as the field for this. The problem I am running into is I can't see a way to change this to multi-select as some applications are used for multiple business capabilities. It doesn't make sense to have these applications duplicated in the portfolio. Would the best option be to create custom fields or am I using the wrong field for this?

Thanks,
BIll

Re: Application Category - Application Portfolio Managment

scott barnard1 — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 14:58:41 GMT

Hi Bill

Something to be aware of is the Common Services Data Model. It get particularly more defined in New York

I've attached the whitepaper as it's useful to be aware of where SN are going around this area.

You'll touch on some of this with APM so be aware and watch you don't paint yourself into a corner.

Regards

Re: Application Category - Application Portfolio Managment

Paul Santaniell — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 22:46:19 GMT

Bill,

I had the same question and I agree with your observation that category is not a good choice for capability due to the many-to-many relationship. I was thinking I'd use the relationships and hide the category. Ultimately, I'd like to add a simplified form that allows an application owner to select the relevant capabilities.

Paul

Re: Application Category - Application Portfolio Managment

David104 — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 03:32:49 GMT

I agree that relationships are absolutely the right way to capture the links between Business Applications (and/or Application Services) and Business Capabilities which they support. The image below is from New York ServiceNow docs for Application Portfolio Management - https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/newyork-it-business-management/page/product/application-portfolio-management/concept/application-portfolio-management.html

You can see the relationship "Provided By::Provides" being used between them

Hope this helps

David

Re: Application Category - Application Portfolio Managment

Paul Santaniell — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 17:04:47 GMT

David,

Do you know if the APM module provides simplified forms for maintaining the Business Capabilities associated with a Business Application? If not, how do people address? OOTB form managing relationships? Custom, user friendly form that can be distributed to application owners?

Paul

Re: Application Category - Application Portfolio Managment

David104 — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 03:29:34 GMT

Hi Paul,

From what I can see in my dev instance, APM does provide some nice views of the information, but creating and maintaining the relationships falls back to the standard forms and '+Related Items' - the same as you would use for any other CI.

I guess if you wanted a simpler way, you could use a custom form, or maybe a catalogue item. I like the idea of updates to the application portfolio being subject to some kind of approval to ensure that there is some governance and control across those changes. APM is geared towards Enterprise Architects and therefore they would generally want to have control over what changes are made to the model

Regards,

David

Re: Application Category - Application Portfolio Managment

Paul Santaniell — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 16:37:34 GMT

Thanks David,

As an EA, I'm looking to have the Application Owners manage a significant portion of the data. I would manage the capabilities, but I envision them defining:

- relationships to capabilities

- surveys

- lifecycle

- cost forecasts etc...

Essentially, I'm looking provide the framework and process definition. Of course, this is just a strategy at this point and I'd love to hear feedback on why this won't work.

Paul

Re: Application Category - Application Portfolio Managment

David104 — Thu, 14 Nov 2019 22:07:38 GMT

My experience is coming from a Config Management point of view here, so maybe a little different to your perspective. For me, I like to have the CI owner to be the one to approve any relationships to objects below, although they don't have to be the ones who provide the information. So as an EA, you own the capabilities and in theory approve any relationships to Business Applications.

This is where I might have a catalogue item which allows a service owner to provide the information in a simplified form with some approval workflow behind it. The danger of allowing any Application owner to update without approval it is that you suddenly have a lot of people potentially making changes based on different understandings of things - and no single, accountable owner or team to verify the changes.

The Surveys, Lifecycle and Cost Forecasts I would have no problem with individual Application owners actually owning that data, although I imagine that some of that would still be done in consultation to ensure consistency. Depending on your confidence in the quality of the data, it might be worth looking to have a process where any changes to the above requires a central approval purely for review and validation. The nice thing about that is that it provides an opportunity for discussion whenever the changes are made.

Re: Application Category - Application Portfolio Managment

Jessica23 — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 09:46:40 GMT

If you want to visualize your Application to Capabilities Relationships, or references if you use that, I would recommend to have a look at the Designer Application in the ServiceNow store: https://ins-pi.com/getdesigner/

Re: Application Category - Application Portfolio Managment

amititp — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 20:56:35 GMT

Definitely CSDM 2.0 should be the referencing model Bill, in addition, APM data classification takes priorities by Industries/Organization - some do wanna keep higher buckets ( such as App. Category, Business Geography, Groups, Size, etc..). It also varies by stakeholder interests.

I would also suggest to create stakeholder based Form views, while serving those consumption of APM Data.

Good luck

Regards,