Is an aging technology portfolio a suspected risk to your organization’s business operations? Are there concerns regarding where or even how to begin addressing this challenge due to the scope of your organization’s applications, software, and infrastructure? Even when trying to meet these issues head-on, the time it has historically taken to solve them can make progress difficult to qualify. Aligning your technology portfolio management strategy to best practices can be a game changer when it comes to minimizing technical debt, gaining visibility and control over the portfolio, and doing so in a period that meets the goals of the business. Read on for some examples of these best practices and how ServiceNow can make aligning with them even easier!
A common theme among enterprises grappling with challenges related to their technology portfolio is that, because of the sheer size or scope of the technologies in use, assets within the portfolio are often managed across a wide range of toolsets. These toolsets will typically focus on a specific class or type of asset, and while they may communicate, the data for these assets are segregated. As a result, business leaders tasked with managing the portfolio may struggle to derive the critical business intelligence needed to make strong decisions regarding the lifecycle of a given technology or function.
By focusing the Technology Portfolio Management effort on a single tool or platform, leaders like IT Directors and Application Owners can gain much broader, more insightful visibility into the totality of the portfolio. An added benefit of centralizing the technology portfolio is the ability to automate data ingestion – and with the right tool, even normalize that data – to ensure business intelligence is kept current and easy to understand.
As you centralize your Portfolio Management data, it is critical to ensure that this data is driving actionable insights to empower the business to stay ahead of the proverbial technology curve. As your technology portfolio data matures, ensuring that structured technology lifecycles are in place becomes increasingly vital. Technology lifecycles define the phases that a technology can or will go through, such as General Availability, End of Life, and End of Support.
When used correctly, technology lifecycles assist the business in planning needed technology changes like decommissions, upgrades, and more. Strategically, having cohesive technology lifecycles across your portfolio can help avoid unintended impacts being driven by those changes. As a result, technology-based risk is easier to identify, and technical debt can begin to be managed more effectively.
Once your technology portfolio is centralized and structured around high-confidence lifecycles, delivering visibility to this information in a manner that is easily consumed and actioned upon should become the priority. Portfolio-centric dashboards that clearly highlight and operationalize the overall state of the portfolio, as well as more specific details like change plans, risks, and cost of ownership vastly improve speed to action. This visibility can also be used to prove regulatory compliance when and where that is necessary, assuming key data points are being sourced into the portfolio. The ability to rapidly adapt available dashboards and reports becomes significantly more valuable within larger, multi-faceted enterprises that may have a variety of resources working to maintain the technology portfolio.
So, how can an enterprise achieve these best practices, and do so in a manner that respects both the time and cost constraints of a functioning business? Consider a ServiceNow offering tailor-built to meet these needs.
Integrity is a certified “Built with ServiceNow” offering that delivers optimization of the Technology Portfolio through the rapid identification of technology risks and reduction of total technical debt. The offering drastically reduces the typical time to value by focusing on specific features of key ServiceNow applications:
In as little as 4 months, Integrity can offer organizations a significant degree of control over their technology portfolio. Through the native cohesion of the Now Platform, this offering not only unlocks an organization’s ability to achieve Technology Portfolio Management best practices, but also delivers additional value streams in minimizing risk, upgrade planning, and regulatory compliance needs.