Starting APM/Enterprise Architecture Module

[Vaibhav_241]

Hey Everyone,

I hope you are doing well.
I'm reaching out for a bit of guidance. I come from ITOM Module background but in my current project i have to assigned to work on a new module "Enterprise Architecture/APM".
While i am currently going through the APM/EA course in now learning. I'm being honest i am finding difficulty to fully gasp everything since this is a completely new area for me.
Please help me with -
Any tips on where and how to start with.
Documents, notes, or step by step guides.
Of if you can share your own experience or help me to understand things.

Thanks in advance for your support and time.

Best Regards,
Vaibhav

[yogesh41]

Hi,

Here are few resources that would definitely provide additional details. 

Enterprise Architecture Welcome Guide

The Platform for Enterprise Architecture - Detailed Walkthrough of EA

SPM Academy - Introducing EA -  SPM Academy: Introducing ServiceNow Enterprise Architecture

Yogesh

[Jim Palmer]

Vaibhav,

I generally think of APM as fitting into 2 broad categories:

1. Operations
Consisting of Technology Reference Models (TRM) and Technology Portfolio Management.
This collects data on what is currently deployed in the 'technical services' domain of the CSDM. ITOM discovery, SAM and service mapping fit here to build a view of the technology underpinning your business services. This is more the data collection part of APM and probably more familiar to you. It feeds information like current hardware/software  installed, it's lifecycle values and indicators (incidents raised etc...) into the 2nd category...

2. Planning

This is where the architecture side exists and is part of the 'design' domain of the CSDM. Here you use the results from TRM/TPM and indicators and can use that to inform architecture decisions.

It's integrated into the SPM module to raise ideas, demands and projects to plan consolidations, upgrades and replacements. Also to drive long term technology decisions like which database platform should we standardise on?

E.g.

Corporation ABC is using a CRM platform thats 10 years old. Using ITOM, SAM and Service Mapping, TPM has found that the key database infrastructure has been out of support for the last year. With TRM it's also found that the web application server is niche platform. Ongoing indicators suggest the number of incidents raised and changes against it has been rising month by month and the total cost of ownership is also on an upward trend.
Considering this is a geographically dispersed business application with production instances across the globe (AP, EU and NA), what is the strategy? Do we keep it and upgrade for compliance? Replace it totally like for like, or change direction entirely?
Enterprise Architecture helps you make those decisions based on information in the ServiceNow platform. 

[Vaibhav_241]

Hi Jim,
Thanks for your reply 

Currently in my project CMDB, Discovery and Service Mapping implementation is ongoing so can you give me any idea about how my approach should be for APM/EA module and any implementation suggestions.

Thanks,
Vaibhav

[Jim Palmer]

Vaibhav,

It's pedestrian, but i'd stick with the CSDM maturity model of foundation, walk, crawl, run and fly phases of the CSDM implementation.

You can approach it from 2 different directions based on the categories i listed above and what you want to get out of it:

2. Planning.

Fewer records in the platform but more manual data entry. As you need manually to define your business applications, capabilities, information objects [optional] and their relationships as you can't discover these. This allow you to do planning (to some extent) but not have any real information (indicators) on the performance, risk or cost of the business applications. You'll have the targets for planning but no real information to make decisions. Business applications are at the crawl phase of CSDM maturity, while capabilities and information objects are at run/fly.

1. Operations.

This take more effort in the platform as ITOM discovery, SAM and service mapping is required to construct the application services (a.k.a. service instances) and then relate to the business applications. This is at the crawl/walk phase of the CSMD maturity model.
I come from an infrastructure background so i normally start with this. it also feeds into the ITSM and event management products as they rely on service mapping to get the most out of impact calculations.

By having this first you can start measuring the application services and see trends in incident/problem/change, note the components that make your infrastructure environment and see if there's any inconsistencies/risks that increase time and costs.

There's a good resource on now create for "CSDM Workshop - Getting Started"

https://nowlearning.servicenow.com/nowcreate?id=nc_asset&asset_id=911bf2b693c6f9d02fac74096cba10cc&n...

i normally start with a handful of critical business applications and the application services underneath. Discover, service map and SAM those, get your processes and governance setup, add the business apps and capabilities.
Get a limited set working first and usable then expand across other targets.