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APM Recap
Many organisations struggle to simultaneously keep up with operational and strategic demands, taking advantage of existing applications, retiring redundant applications, and understanding where and how creating compelling new applications will help to fulfil strategic business needs.
ServiceNow Application Portfolio Management (APM) leverages the power of the platform to help address the following challenges:
- Departments deploying multiple applications for similar functions, resulting in duplication, and increasing complexity and costs
- Increasing cost and risk of maintaining multiple redundant and / or ageing applications
- Ongoing need to upgrade existing applications in order to access new functionality.
- Conflict between in-house legacy applications and that of the vendors.
- Challenges with inadequate performance and ongoing support of outdated applications.
Primary APM Use Cases on ServiceNow
ServiceNow supports these requirements through three primary use cases;
- Capability-Based Planning
- Application Portfolio Rationalisation
- Technology Portfolio Management
Capability-Based Planning
Business capabilities are the abilities of an organisation to complete the activities necessary to fulfil its business goals. Capability-Based Planning enables the Enterprise Architect / Business Owner to understand current business capabilities, any associated capability weaknesses and risks, and hence to identify which capabilities need the most investments to close technical gaps.
Capability-based planning provides:
Better alignment of IT investment decisions into appropriate initiatives and projects to build and maintain key business capabilities.
Identification of technical gaps related to a business capability, and technology risks in the application portfolio associated to a given business capability.
The Capability Map provides a graphical representation of the business capability hierarchy, providing insight into which business applications support each capability, and scores against each capability, highlighting risks and capability areas requiring attention. Scores are measured across people, processes, and technology, and are automatically derived from platform data and assessment outputs, and are used to align application portfolio decisions to requisite business capabilities.
Capability-based planning can leverage existing capability frameworks, for example the framework from the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) framework.
Application Portfolio Rationalisation
ServiceNow Application Portfolio Rationalisation leverages platform data, relationships, tools and automation to follow a process of classification, measurement, analyses and planning. The result is objective data and visualisations to support the decision-making process.
CLASSIFY
The process of rationalising the portfolio starts with creating an inventory of all applications, together with the underlying technology (HW, OS, database, etc.).
Automated tools can quickly capture server and application information, while human input is required to capture scoring information such as business capability mapping, strategic value, functional fit, conformance to IT standards, risk and TCO.
Leverage the CMDB to capture and maintain the application inventory.
MEASURE
Define and gather the metrics necessary to support the application portfolio management decision process. Metrics or Indicators to assess applications cover multiple dimensions, such as Cost, Quality, Technical Risk, Investments, User Satisfaction, Business Value etc.
Out of the box indicators can be sourced from ITFM, ITSM, PPM, Surveys/Assessments, or imported from external sources. The indicators are user-extensible and presented in an Assessment Dashboard for visualised decision making
ANALYSE
Analyse the portfolio based on the future architecture plan. Leverage bubble charts to compare critical metrics to understand what actions to take against each application; replacement, retirement, consolidation, upgrade, modernise, etc.
Take into account information architecture changes required to support the rationalisation decisions, and the associated integration changes.
Propose the appropriate actions to transform the current state architecture to the desired future state using transitional architectures.
PLAN
Once the future and transitional states are understood, demands should be created to feed into the project and portfolio management process for decisions around which projects to fund. This will result in the creation of a roadmap (macro-plan) of projects, taking into consideration the wider portfolio of demands and the supply of resources with the requisite skills.
To support the measurement phase above, ServiceNow provides a set of indicators such as capital costs, internal & external labour costs, number of incidents and changes. Additional criteria can be created to match customers’ unique assessment requirements. In addition, platform-based assessments can be used to gather qualitative data such as CSAT, functional fit, and business value.
The ServiceNow Application Assessment Framework takes the various indicator values and configured weightings to provide a score against each application to support consistent application assessment and informed decision making.
Technology Portfolio Management
Technology Portfolio Management enables the Enterprise Architect (EA) to track the versions and lifecycles of technologies and determine which business applications are at risk due to expired/end of life technologies.
TMP allows users to:
• Assess risk on Business Capabilities and Business Applications using outdated software
• Identify Application Modernisation / Investment needs
• Applications nearing EOL
• Applications with expiring contracts / subscriptions
• Aging Applications – releases behind the current available version in the market
The versions and lifecycle state of the technology underlying the business applications must be tracked to better plan upgrades, investment in new applications, and/or retirement of the applications that are no longer supported by the vendors. The systematic management of the technology portfolio of business applications helps you to optimise costs, reduce application redundancy, and minimise business risk.
The platform maintains records of all software models associated with each business application. In turn, each software model has associated software lifecycles – both from the software publisher and created internally if internal policies differ.
Dependencies maintained in the CMDB between the applications delivering business services, and the technology supporting those applications highlight the impact of technology lifecycle on business-critical services. Additionally, visibility of the impact of technology lifecycle on the business applications is also surfaced in the capability map of the Capability-Based Planning to show technology risks against each business capability.
Data Integrity Checks
The inventory of business applications is recorded one time, but the reality of the application portfolio keeps changing. Therefore, it is imperative that the business application inventory and integrations data, and the technologies data is kept up-to-date by certifying the data in the business applications table periodically. This is achieved through scheduled platform jobs and/or by ad-hoc jobs, surveys, and assessments using platform capabilities.
Maintaining the integrity of the business application data ensures accurate assessment of the business applications and supports trust in the assessment results.
Summary
The operational data in the platform, together with the platform capabilities such as workflow automation, surveys and assessments provide powerful insight to support the decisions required to effectively manage an organisation’s portfolio of business applications. This drives a reduction in application costs through application rationalisation, a reduction in business risk by aligning investments to key business capabilities, and provides real-time executive insight across the application landscape.
