[Music] hi everyone welcome to glidecast on air i'm lauren jankowski the marketing manager here at glidecast and i'll be moderating today's webinar how to cut back on organizational excess with application portfolio management before we get started i'd like to give you some background information on glidecast consulting glidefast is a consulting firm that is dedicated exclusively to servicenow as an elite servicenow partner our expert team of develop developers and architects have worked on both sides of the table the customer side and the consulting side our company was founded by servicenow architects and we're proud to have a team of over 150 experienced consultants an average csat score of a 4.8 out of 5 and many more accolades as you can see here as a perk of attending today's webinar we'll be giving away a 50 visa gift card we'll announce the winner at the end of today's session so be sure be sure to stay on for the entire webinar i'm excited to introduce to you our presenters for today ashley snyder a technical consultant at glidefast chris yang a technical consultant at glidecast and albert sue a senior principal product manager at servicenow i'll be monitoring the q a throughout today's session so please send in any questions as they arise and we'll do our best to answer them ashley you could take it from here thank you lauren i'd like to thank everyone for joining this glide fast on air webinar how to cut back on organizational success with application portfolio management my name is ashley snyder and i'm a technical component with glidefast joining me today from glidefast is chris yang and albert hughes from servicenow i'll start this session with an overview of application portfolio management and then i'll outline the use cases that drive the transformation of an optimized portfolio while reducing risk at the end of the session chris will provide a demo and albert will present some exciting new features in apm we'll also have some time for q a after the session so i'd like to begin with an overview of application portfolio management apm is part of the it business management suite within servicenow it ties into many other areas of the servicenow platform such as software asset management and the cmdb apm is used to define a comprehensive application inventory reduce total cost of ownership by eliminating redundancies and applications strengthen business capabilities by identifying technical gaps and prevent risk by tracking life cycles with technology portfolio management when implementing apm it is helpful to ask key questions to ensure the right requirements are being captured questions such as what is the goal of the business strategy what are the current applications in the portfolio and how do they align to that strategy who are the application owners and how are they tracking application value what are the risks of using an application that has supporting technology that is engineering end of life what type of information is being used and what risks are present with applications using that information and how can applications be measured to decide which ones to invest in or retire in addition to asking the right questions there are four main key stakeholder groups that need to be engaged during the implementation first is it leadership these stakeholders are concerned with i.t investments and use the application rationalization process to understand and drive down the total cost of ownership for the application portfolio second are enterprise architects they are responsible for aligning applications to services business capabilities and the overall strategy third are application owners this group is responsible for the business value and health of their applications they create lifecycle plans standards and are responsible for the integrity of application attributes via data certification and last is it operations operations is concerned with application stability high incident counts and require up-to-date infrastructure mapping for incident resolution and outages now that i've provided an overview of apm i'll move on to the use cases that facilitate an organization in crafting an efficient portfolio with the most common use case as the creation of an application inventory device configuration items need to be stored within the cmdb in order to begin the inventory servicenow discovery scans the application and device bis on the organization's network and maps them into their corresponding tables within the cmdb after devices are mapped to discovery service mapping locates application services and builds a comprehensive map of the devices applications their dependencies and configuration profiles used in business services software asset management pairs with the cmdb in order to track vendor risk and life cycle plans of the software and hardware models that support applications after the creation of an application inventory application owners categorize business applications based on purpose and function and function for rationalization and keep attributes up to date with data certification so overlapping with the creation of an application inventory the application rationalization process is utilized to optimize the current portfolio state application rationalization is broken down into four stages during the first stage an inventory is created and application owners classify applications based on categories and scoring once an inventory has been constructed the second stage is to measure the applications that reside within it apm ships with out-of-the-box indicators to assess applications based on cost quality risk and user satisfaction in order to understand the current state of the portfolio after the current phase of portfolio has been established and the analyzation stage is used to define the future state of the portfolio by taking into account strategic value functional fit and risk of applications and the final stage is the plan and take action data is used from the analyzation stage to make decisions on projects to fund which applications should be retired or replaced and the creation of application road maps once the organization has matured into its use of apm by creating an application inventory and utilizing application rationalization it can take advantage of capability-based planning what is a business capability it's defined as an expression of what a business does and what it can do when defining business capabilities we're not concerned with who and how as these items will change some examples of business capabilities are human resources management or business administration and operations servicenow has created a specific ci class for business capabilities using the common service data model within the cmdb in associating business capability ci to application and service dis an organization can track and measure if applications and services are supporting the business capabilities business capabilities should be well-defined in order to gauge how well applications and services are aligning to them through accurate definition of mapping organizations can identify technical gaps and redundancies within their it infrastructure in order to make better strategic investments as an organization reduces costs by rationalization rationalizing applications and makes strategic investments using capability-based planning it can also equip technology portfolio management to minimize vendor risk and track life cycles for the applications and technologies within the portfolio surface now software asset management partners with the cmdb and apm to provide insight on vendor risk issues for the software and hardware models of the underlying infrastructure that support business applications outdated software versions vendor support contracts and end-of-life technologies are risks that life cycle stages need to track in order to prevent or minimize their impact the technology portfolio management timeline is a visual tool that allows stakeholders to view these risks at a glance in addition to preventing vendor risk technology portfolio management allows organizations to set internal life cycle guidance for software models and assist in upgrade processes such as retiring technologies that support applications without causing an impact to the applications themselves at this point the organization has created an efficient portfolio and reduced technology risk what about the information that is used by applications within the portfolio and how is that information tracked the information portfolio provides the organization visibility into types of data being stored and how applications are interacting with that data servicenow created the information object ci class as part of the common service data model an information object is a logical representation of the type of information that is exchanged between an application and its related database by tracking information as configuration items stakeholders can quickly detect the impact of data in an event such as a security breach or an outage within application portfolio management business application cis are related to database cis database cis provide information to the application ci using the information object ci within this relationship attributes of the types of operations that can be performed on data such as create read update and delete are captured collections of information objects are created by categorizing them into data domains as an example of a data domain would be employee data stakeholders can use the information portfolio to drill down into different information objects that are within a data domain and view attributes such as if the data is sensitive who owns the information and the business units or departments that are using the information so to recap i've detailed the main uses of applications portfolio management to reduce the total cost of ownership and risk of a portfolio the last topic i want to discuss that appeared on the previous slides is the common service data model the cscm is a configured configuration management database framework that sets the standard for configuration item mapping for all servicenow products that use the cmdb i've mentioned some of the new ci classes introduced in cscm such as business capabilities and information objects previously the last one i'll touch base on is the application service ci class an application service is a logical representation of a deployed application stack application services are often referred to as instances of a business application application services can be used operationally to track which deployment of the business application is experiencing an issue and creating an incident for example servicenow dev is down but servicenow prod is not on the right side of the slide we have examples of the type of data that fit within the common service data model hierarchy to leverage the full power of apm it's important that data within the cmdb is gathered and related properly for a deep dive into csem we have a glidecast on air webinar titled breaking down the common service data model presented by our own jacob benker and will young i want to thank everyone for allowing me to guide you through the main uses of apm that empowers an organization to reduce its cost and risk within its portfolio i'll now hand over the presentation to chris yang and albert hube for a demo and more information on apm and how it relates to other servicenow applications yeah thank you actually for such a great overview of apm uh so i'll be going over a demo of the ap application portfolio management portal that's in servicenow the apm portal is divided into four main portfolios the business portfolio information portfolio application portfolio and the technology portfolio so the business portfolio is where you you go to do all your business capability planning activities it shows the existing capabilities for your organization mapped mapped by their parent child relationships we can use uh manage capability hierarchy to easily add or edit existing capabilities here number seven we see the top level capability we want to provide is manage customer service within this capability is supported by sub-capabilities evaluate customer operations and customer satisfaction and managed product recalls and regulatory audits and etc each of these sub capabilities can contain others as well and you can have up to six levels of capability mapping each capability shows the latest capability score that's calculated by their fiscal period which is defined in a list of rules in your instance you can also see which business applications support that capability and their overall score as well example manage customer service supported by custrack and legacy customer service next i'll be handing over to al to discuss some features around the information portfolio thanks chris let me just share my screen quickly so we added a new object in apm in our new york release called information objects so what you're looking at is a list view of all the information objects on the that we've now have in the platform i'm just going to group them by data domain to quickly show you the idea behind this is now we can start to categorize the information that's used by your business applications so as ashley mentioned one of the core aspects of managing your application inventory is what information is being used so it's a core lens that we like to look at our application so i can understand which applications use payment card information for pci dss regulations personally identifiable information like as we had mentioned the example with the csdm customer email customer account number etc or employee data so example is employee benefits if i drill into this here you'll see the attributes we're tracking for an information object but most importantly we're understanding the relationships it has both to the business applications and the infrastructure so if i bring up this dependency view what you'll see is a map that shows here's an information object called employee benefits in the middle and we can understand that two business applications are using this information so rewards engagement and avid employee engagement system are both showing employee benefits information and we can actually track how it's being used for example is it a create read update or delete relationship or is it a read only we can track that on apm and additionally we can see where the information actually is physically we can see here it's both in a structured data for database catalog on the right hand side or an exchange mailbox which is unstructured data in addition to exchange mailboxes you can have file systems and files themselves where you're mapping an information object to exactly where it's located in the environment all right i'll just turn it back to chris to walk you through some of the other features and we'll come back to other things as well so back to the apm portal next we have the application portfolio and this will list all the application in the organization similar to other lists in the platform view you can use show matching or filter out feature on the particular value to apply to desired filter and we can insert a table by any of these columns for example the user base to see the applications that are being most utilized in the organization in the analyze section of the application portfolio we can select an application category to do further analysis on a group of applications looking to customer support we can see a bubble chart view for the application category and we can select assessment period to filter on certain criteria to narrow down the application list by default is the latest fiscal period in the bubble chart we can see the axes represent csat versus a functional fit score by default and the size of the bubble represent the number of incidents submitted against that application we have the ability to change to other options such as technical risk score versus the business value score and the bubble size as a number of changes this will give additional insights depending on which parameters that you choose as mentioned before the value at epm on the now platform is being able to take action where you see there is a gap we can create demand by clicking on an application in the bubble chart tying back to the theme of the webinar of reducing organizational access the legacy customer service application has a low technical risk or which means it's at a high risk and a low business value score which makes it a good candidate for us to be for for it to be replaced or retired so here we can create a demand action will say retire application and we'll give it retire customer service legacy for the category i'm going to leave it as strategic type as the project and we can set a start date of beginning of next month so back to the apm portal and the last portfolio i'm going to show today is the technology portfolio here we can see all the hardware and software models associated with the particular business application grew by their risk ratings the risk of the hardware and software models roll up to the application server hey chris to interrupt do you mind just zooming it back a little bit just so we can see a little more of the real estate on there yeah that that's that's good right there okay much better thanks al um right so the risk of the hardware and software models roll up to the application service which in turn rolls up to the business application for example we can see that the big slash has three application services two of which has a high risk rating due to the underlying software model being out of support the oracle db server is at high risk and and that's because um it's past the end of uh life cycle support this in turn gives the application a high risk rating as well like other areas of the apm portal we can create a demand right from this view and upgrade the oracle database server to the current standards action here we can select align to architecture standard we'll give it a name of upgrade oracle db server category we can say operational this time and type would be a change so this logs into a demand which if you use ppm in servicenow it will tie into the itbm portfolio okay now that we have uh an organized and matured our application and business portfolios the next question would be how do we maintain this data and keeping it current this is where servicenow's data certification comes into play out-of-the-box apm provides a certification schedule for the applications on a quarterly basis this can be easily extended to other areas of csdm such application services or information objects when i was a servicenow customer before this feature was available i did this manually by emailing all the application owners on a quarterly basis and not only the response rate was low it was difficult to track as well the this feature would have made the process much easier since it creates tasks for the application owners to complete and sends follow-up emails automatically apm is a data-driven capability and having that consistent and reliable data through the data certification process is critical to the success of apm right now i will hand it back to ashley for some question slides all right i think lauren you have the questions here yep um looks like a couple questions that come in um here's the first one for you guys why should we use servicenow instead of instead of some other platform for apn yeah so i can go ahead and take that one so servicenow um you know you can you can leverage the uh the hard work you have already done in other parts of servicenow such as the cmdb csdm um if you have a discovery or service mapping enabled all that hard work is going to roll up into apm so you don't need to start over from scratch and on top of that you can create a central allies repository of all your business capabilities and your applications in servicenow so it can serve as a source of truth awesome chris i'd like to add on to that too so what i've noticed working at different customers before working at glide fast is a lot of other customers are already using demand and projects with an itbm and with apm being part of itbm you know it's just integrates seamlessly and you can go ahead and start using it with your demand and project processes within servicenow great and finally i'll also add if if you don't mind i'll just share a screen quickly um if you can see uh one of the things i've found with the customers not adopting a platform approach is for other tools or even in their sharepoint or spreadsheets they're adding a lot of attributes or information to that one thing so or even if you're customizing an application record on the platform you're adding all these additional tabs of information well in servicenow actually because you adopt a more platform approach application portfolio management really integrates more against all of the other applications of platforms so really accelerate the value you're using for other applications typically customers using application portfolio management solutions or platforms outside of servicenow have to integrate all these this data which adds a lot of maintenance nightmares but especially keeping data up-to-date and if you if the data is not up to date you're not going to trust that information if you don't trust that you're not going to make any decisions and if you don't make any decisions there's no value so really thinking about a platform approach is the most important thing you can think of um here's another question can apm be implemented in phases what is the best approach to get started since so many stakeholders need to be engaged and much data is needed to be gathered great i'll go ahead and take this one unless she wants you out and go ahead go ahead ashley go ahead okay well i was just going to talk um there is a maturity model in apm um there's about like four different stages of maturity but the first one is to create that application inventory within servicenow that's going to be the most common use case that a lot of organizations use and that's where they're going to get started as far as bringing all those cis and applications within that central repository that way like al said they trust that data and they know where it's at and then they can move on to the business capability planning they can move on to technology portfolio management as they you know have that solid application inventory of data certification and i'll let you add on if you have more no that's exactly right i think the first level of maturity is just establishing ownership one of the key things to easily make a decision is if you can't find an owner in the business for that application its asked the question why are we still running this so by doing that quick inventory you don't have to gather cost information infrastructure data asset management data you can just quickly establish well if we're not using this application anymore there's no need for us to continue running it very easy to quickly reduce the applications or the tco that you're running infrastructure on by removing that so ashley you're right on awesome great question um here's another do we need to implement csdm in order to start working with apm so i'll take that one common service data model is more prescriptive guide it's not really a product or thing like that if you want to start doing application portfolio management as ashley mentioned you want to start with your application inventory that's the business applications so really putting them in the right table is kind of your first question and so it's really not about implementing csdm it's just what do we want to do in terms of using the right tables and service now so business applications and business capabilities are part of apm and they're prescribed by the common service data model so that first level of maturity that actually talked about is getting your inventory in there establishing ownership who owns those and then the next level is the business value aligning it to business capabilities in the platform is that first step to onboarding apm but all by by the way it also helps you with your csdm journey as well awesome and here's a follow-up to that if we have our current inventory in the business application table how do we migrate yeah the great news christine is you don't have to do anything if you have it in the business application table which is the cmdb ci business app table you don't have to do anything the question is do you want to take advantage of the additional features that apm provides so that's where you can look at subscribing to apm and unlocking additional features that chris demonstrated for you in terms of how to manage technology life cycles how do we understand application analysis or application rationalization or the information objects in managing those so and and then finally the business capabilities so that's a great question um and certainly glidefast can help you with that uh adoption and maturity as you get because you continue on it sounds like that might be a customer you want you might want to talk to ashley about seeing how you can help them with their journey yeah definitely thank you for sure um here's we still have two more questions um what modules do you recommend to have in place before implementing apm um so actually that's a good question there isn't really any dependency because the business application table is out of the box it's provided there um you can start right away where when you get to the next level is maturity having cmdb in place understanding your application services is going to help you so it's not necessarily modules but really you know the cmd maturity is what i would say um definitely ppm if you you can what chris had shown you is we show you insights into your application inventory and so you can create an action but to track that action actually actually execute on you might want to look at our itbm or project portfolio management to really get the benefit realization of that action so that's an example of where adding new additional features really enhances the value versus there really isn't any dependencies to get you started uh with 8pm awesome and here's one last question for you guys what are some new features of apm that um were released in paris yeah if you don't mind i can take that one again so let me just share my screen again so this is that maturity model let me talk about what's new in apm here so uh first of all go into uh new features here in paris so last month we released our paris release really excited about it one of the things we added was exposing the power of the platform and the workflow capabilities to the enterprise architect or your solution architects so in the past you know how do we onboard an application for business units you know it might be like if i'm in finance or hr and it's asking me to register my business applications it might have been a cumbersome process we've really created a workflow called register business application where someone can onboard a new application very easily and what it does it gives them an approval workflow so that an enterprise architect can see that submission and decide oh no we already have that record we don't need to create it or they can go ahead and approve it and it creates the record automatically so that's the birth of an application on the flip side we added retired business application it's really the death so hopefully we want to enhance you know that retirement of legacy infrastructure applications we now have a workflow where a business owner can retire an application and then we can assign a project template against it you know first of all let's remove all the licenses archive the data set up a plan to retire the infrastructure so this is a workflow that we've created to help you retire business applications and then in the middle any requests that you have for enterprise architect to do architecture reviews we have a third uh request for for that as well so that's one of the features in paris another one is in if you've seen apm before and what chris had talked about is creating demands or building a road map well in the past we only showed demands and projects only which is more legacy waterfall type activities now we combine this into a backlog where you can see projects demands and your epics and stories both your agile and waterfall work in one single timeline view so that's called the application backlog feature and then also the par with the csdm the common service data model as you start populating tables and service now according to the csdm you can take advantage of something called the cmdb query builder so this allows you to create really cool reports such as i want to know all the personally identifiable information on all business applications you can create a query like that or i want to understand all these servers that are part of an application service that are part of a business application that are part of the procure to pay business capability so there's really cool reports you can create based on the cmd query builder and then the last one which i'm really excited about is our integration with our grc governance risk and compliance applications for many organizations that have over 500 applications it's really tough to assess the risk to the business of these for example what applications introduce general data protection regulation controls which ones are having pci payment card information or data security standards controls that are part of it or how do we assess which are what are our crown jewel applications for example which applications hold our critical customer data well now we've created an automated workflow with our um grc integration which kind of follows like this once you start the business application once it's created in servicenow in the apm this is where grc creates what's called an entity automatically so now we can start to audit that application and then what we do is two flows of automation one is we send a questionnaire to the application owner that's again that's why ownership is important and that questionnaire allows them to answer questions that the risk analyst needs to understand and review so the app owner responds to the questionnaire on the left hand side and on the right hand side sorry we also use the information objects to understand okay what controls for example if we knew that there is a credit card number as part of an application we know it's going to be submitted to certain pci dss controls so those are two automations that work on parallel if we go on the left hand side here with the responding to questionnaire the risk analyst can now review the response and that's an iterative loop so they they keep iterating making sure that the responses are satisfied satisfactory and then the risk analysts can go ahead and start to assess based on the results of that what is the criticality of the application so a lot of times now we can help prioritize to understand oh this application that's newly onboarded falls under these controls and is this is either mission critical or it's maybe just something that's used internally and then as you continue on i won't go through all the workflow we automate the automation of assessing policies risks citations against the applications and recommend tasks or mediations or activities that you need to do to help control that application so it's a full workflow that we've built in and again very quickly it's it's available to you for any apm and grc customer you can now download two store applications just like you do on your iphone you can download it to your instance and add this capability and right from there you'll see that on the business application record we've added these additional tabs you know we can understand what what is a risk questionnaire what is the automated risk summary or on the right hand side grc can understand what risks are generated and then what are the issues and remediations i need to take so this is some of the integrations and new features we've added in our from our paris release awesome thanks so much for that albert um that looks like all the questions that came in for the webinar so it is time to announce the winner of our 50 visa gift card and it looks like the winner is angela tarnowski congratulations angela we will email the prize to you directly i'd like to thank everyone for attending today's webinar and a big shout out to albert from servicenow for joining us today um and thank you to ashley and chris if anyone has any questions don't hesitate to reach out to us at info glidefast.com if you have any more questions that arise and to see more sessions just visit us at www.clydefast.com to see more on airs just like today thanks everyone and enjoy the rest of your day