Technology Portfolio Management made easy

Mining the CMDB to understand how technology is used

To deliver the overall technology foot-print used in a Business Application, it’s necessary to short circuit the myriad of relationships that naturally exist in a CMDB between the various CI’s and dependencies. To identify that concise list of software (and hardware) being used exactly required a process to gather up all the relates SW, deduplicate it, normalize the naming conventions, and to get the other product meta-data subsequently used in the risk calculation.

This process APM provides as of Madrid is similar to what cave-divers do in “spelunking” to find all spaces available in a cave system. In our approach, we traverse all CMDB relationships associated to the Application Services (think instance of the Business Application) in order to present a concise list of Software actually in use. The following picture is a typical result of that process, allowing application owners to select which software models are pertinent to keep tabs on, which ones are not.

The following screenshot shows the related normalized software inventory that was identified. The status column indicated what Software Models are currently associated to a Business Application for risk purposes, or not. The Ignore column allows you to ignore some Software Models in the risks calculation, this is useful for discarding less important software models that were identified, or used for another Business Application shared on the same infrastructure.

Governing technology consumption: Building a Technology Catalog

Given ServiceNow’s focus on services, technology teams within our customers often take advantage of being service providers to their IT colleagues too. User experience improves, and management of the lifecycle of the consumption, experience for consumers, and better governance of the processes becomes a more integrated and seamless aspect of managing the consumption of technologies. It is recommended that approved technologies have Services created and provided in a catalog. By virtue of being in a catalog for consumption, they are approved for use. This approach makes it easy to see and consume any technology that is approved, have well defined offers, provide automated fulfilment and track subscriptions. technologies approved with the often-overlooked aspects of also providing an easy self-service vehicle allowing those in IT to leverage them. This includes license entitlement tracking, usage tracking, understanding costs, capacity, track who / what is consuming the technology, and being able to fulfill requests that require more complex handling through the appropriate built-in workflow processes. For those technologies that are in a limited use phase for example, additional approval steps can ensure that the use is justifies, tracked, and approved by the stakeholders concerned.

Other use cases and considerations

The taxonomy of Software and Hardware is provided with UNSPC taxonomy by the Software Asset Management data and subscription by default. This is a world-wide accepted structure that addresses the categorization of the software being used.

The main source for the codes:https://www.unspsc.org/

Software is found in section starting with 432. Here are the main categories you will typically see:

432315 BUSINESS FUNCTION SPECIFIC SOFTWARE 432316 FINANCE ACCTING, ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING ERP SOFTWARE 432320 COMPUTER GAME OR ENTERTAINMENT SOFTWARE 432321 CONTENT AUTHORING AND EDITING SOFTWARE 432322 CONTENT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE 432323 DATA MANAGEMENT AND QUERY SOFTWARE 432324 DEVELOPMENT SOFTWARE 432325 EDUCATIONAL OR REFERENCE SOFTWARE 432326 INDUSTRY SPECIFIC SOFTWARE 432327 NETWORK APPLICATIONS SOFTWARE 432328 NETWORK MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE 432329 NETWORKING SOFTWARE 432330 OPERATING ENVIRONMENT SOFTWARE 432332 SECURITY AND PROTECTION SOFTWARE 432334 UTILITY AND DEVICE DRIVER SOFTWARE432335 INFORMATION EXCHANGE SOFTWARE432336 ELECTRICAL EQUIPMENT SOFTWARE

432337 SYSTEM MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

Future technology plans

In many organizations, the ability to communicate future technologies planning to be introduced and required to used is an important aspect of technology lifecycle management. In a standards approach, this is typically done by communicating those technologies in an emerging phase, or with general availability dates in the future.

Leveraging PPM Project Roadmap views grouped into portfolios of planned technology efforts or transitions, customers can readily convey the particular timeline where new technologies will be introduced, and better plan impacts of those changes through the project scoping, resourcing, and funding activity. Project or portfolio naming naming conventions can be used to help convey technology transition themes, or specific technology transitions such as OS upgrade efforts or hardware refresh activities.

Likewise the a service catalog can be leveraged to commutate what standards will be introduced at the point of consumption. This providing a natural mechanism for those interested in a new technology that's not mainstream yet to register their interest. Technology engineering teams responsible for making them available can engage the early adopters, and ensure a smooth transition of technology use as the new standard.

Hardware Lifecycles

Technology lifecycle management often includes tracking the Hardware Lifecycles in addition to Software. Given the commoditization of Hardware and push to the cloud this is a diminishing concern for most IT organizations these days, but still a concern. Currently, ServiceNow doesn’t address hardware lifecycle management in same way we manage Software Models. In addition, often Hardware is used until it fails, or is fully depreciated. The main drivers for replacing hardware are therefore capability in the hardware, space and electricity run-rate costs, availability of spare parts or simply scheduled upgrades in keeping with the Moores law progression for example.

Conclusion

In summary, ServiceNow allows for the current-use of technologies to be identified, risks calculated, and impacts to business capabilities readily. ServiceNow provides an easy mechanism to provide consumers self-service processes to use technologies, and a robust tracking mechanism that ties workflow and asset management solutions where entitlements are managed. Only ServiceNow is able to seamlessly integrate otherwise disparate practices and processes into a seamless technology management discipline that is both pragmatic, and detailed for both the technology owners and their users.

More Information:

About Technology Portfolio Management

About Software Model Suggestions feature

Video on how the key ServiceNow products work together for TPM

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