If you've employed ServiceNow's IT Service Management solution to take control of your service processes, and our IT Operations Management solution to manage IT operations, what about the business side of IT? Are you managing IT projects, development and financials?
IT runs like a mini business within most organizations, and projects and financials may slide into the red without a way to track and scrutinize your resources, timelines and costs.
IT Business Management, or ITBM, provides a suite of applications to rein in the business processes within IT, to help you:
- See what's happening
- Align projects and resources with your strategic goals
- Deliver products and services faster
In this installment of our NOWSupport best practices series, we take a quick tour of the applications that make up ITBM, and give you resources to learn more, including our our Getting Started with ITBM video playlist on our NOWsupport YouTube channel.
What is Application Portfolio Management?
Most companies have a plethora of software applications - some used regularly, others obsolete. Application Portfolio Management provides the tools to help you:
- Identify the applications you have
- Measure each app in terms of quality, cost, usage, and risk
- Evaluate each app
- Decide whether to invest in each app, maintain it as is, replace it with another app, or retire it
- Take action based on your decision
For more details and product demos, see our video below:
What is Agile Development?
Agile development is a software development methodology with an iterative, incremental, and flexible approach. The ServiceNow Agile Development 2.0 application can help you implement an Agile software development framework for your software development lifecycle. See our post Agile 101—What is Agile development and why do you need it? for more details, and check out our Agile video series, starting with the video below.
If you need to scale your development efforts on a larger scale—larger products, more teams, and longer timeframes—while stilll applying lean and agile practices, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) may be a better solution for your organization. Learn more about SAFe in this post: SAFe 101—What is the Scaled Agile Framework and why do you need it?
Note: SAFe® and Scaled Agile Framework® are registered trademarks of Scaled Agile, Inc.
What is Financial Management?
Also called IT Financial Management, the Financial Management application allows you to allocate, track, and report on expenses in your organization.
This application is a fully transparent costing methodology, describing IT expenses as they are allocated to IT shared services, applications and consuming business units. It uses the General Ledger, or GL, as the fundamental source of information, and leverages data from the Now Platform to map your costs and usage.
See our ITFM video series for more information, starting with this overview:
What is Project Portfolio Management?
Project Portfolio Management is a suite of applications that provides a simple, team-oriented approach to managing IT projects throughout their lifecycle.
See our video below, and this post for more information: PPM 101—What is PPM, and why do you need it?
For more information
To learn more about ITBM in ServiceNow, check out all the videos in our Getting Started with ITBM video playlist on our NOWSupport YouTube channel, starting with this one:
IT Business Management (product documentation)
Project Portfolio Management (product documentation)
Agile Development (product documentation)
Financial Management (product documentation)
Application Portfolio Management (product documentation)
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Behind the scenes here at ServiceNow, the Knowledge Management and Multimedia teams work closely with subject matter experts to disseminate critical information to our customers. We've found that certain topics come up frequently, in the form of best practices that can help you keep your ServiceNow instances running smoothly. This series targets those topics so that you and your organization can benefit from our collective expertise. If you have a best practices topic you'd like us to cover in this series, please let us know in the comments below.
To access all of the blog posts in this series, see our NOWSupport best practices series list.
