Strategic technology management – what a concept

[James182]

Your five-step fitness journey to managing your technology like a business

If I said that it was important to manage the product portfolio, to understand the collective and individual product lifecycles and to balance investment between innovation, growth and maintenance, you would probably assume I was talking to the business. But I’m referring to IT.

Technology investments have to support the business’ ability to deliver results. They are an expensive part of the operating infrastructure of every business and if they aren’t contributing to success, then they’re simply taking money away from the bottom line. You have to ensure that your organization’s technology infrastructure is generating a return on the investment being made in it – both at the level of each individual element and for the entire portfolio of applications, services and platforms.

You need to ensure that every aspect has a plan for its development, maturity and ultimate retirement. And you must ensure there is an effective succession plan in place. You must manage technology just like the business manages its products and services – strategically and proactively.

In today’s world where disruption happens every day across multiple parts of the business, proactive, strategic management is the only way organizations can even hope to stay ahead of the curve. Yet for many IT organizations it’s a struggle to even produce an accurate and current inventory of applications.

Your business-focused colleagues are trying to pivot their priorities in response to multiple disruptive influences. In the process, they’re creating an agile enterprise that can be resilient to threats, take advantage of opportunities, optimize performance, drive sustainable, long-term business value, and delight customers.

Unless you can support them with creative and effective technology investments that prioritize and optimize their ability to achieve business value, you’re a barrier to success. Unless you can optimize investment innovations that create new business opportunities, you are working against the interests of your business partners. Simply being the cool new thing isn’t enough. In fact, it’s a path that leads to failure.

Every IT organization must rapidly move from simple, manual asset tracking to a single, integrated, current and actively maintained window into your technology investments—in the context of the business needs they support and the objectives they contribute to. You must then provide total transparency through that window to every business area so that strategic decisions can be made with all available information, as quickly as possible.

That requires a commitment to creating a level of application portfolio fitness that you previously never thought possible. ServiceNow is here to help you achieve that goal. To learn more, download the eBook The IT Fitness Journey: Application Portfolio Management.