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What is application portfolio management?

Application portfolio management (APM) is the discipline of developing and governing application strategy to optimize a company’s technology stack.

Given the ever-increasing acceleration towards digitalization and increasing adoption of applications to support the transformation, organizations are discovering that governance and visibility into their app portfolios are becoming extremely difficult tasks. And, as software capabilities become more extensive, organizations are embracing a larger number of applications needed to support the business. As such, with this increased digital adoption, companies are seeing a specific disadvantage in the shift towards application transparency: application sprawl.

Companies try to manage their application sprawl and inventory by creating a list of applications in excel but that can easily lead to data duplication and become out of date quickly. To ensure that their tech stacks remain efficient and applicable to their current and ongoing needs, businesses are discovering that they need a comprehensive overview of their entire software portfolio.

Application portfolio management (APM) is the solution. APM strengthens organizations with insights and real-time data analysis vital to managing their complete application landscape. The end results? Better allocation of costs, a clearer understanding of applications that support the business capability, greater alignment of APM to business strategy, and reduction of risk by understanding which applications are nearing end of life. Enterprise architects need to support today's application infrastructure while planning for tomorrow's business roadmap.

What are the benefits of application portfolio management?

APM places a business’ entire software stack under a microscope, providing a detailed picture of every application and bringing them in line with the big-picture strategy for the enterprise. As such, application portfolio management empowers organizations to:

• Eliminate risks,
• Simplify and optimize IT infrastructure,
• Evaluate strategy based on reliable data,
• Rationalize costs,
• Prioritize initiatives,
• Improve business processes,
• Optimize communication and collaboration.

ServiceNow APM

ServiceNow’s Application Portfolio Management (APM) provides a complete picture of the application estate, including the underlying technology relationships. APM starts by building a comprehensive inventory of your business applications, providing enterprise architects and application owners with four lenses by which to analyze the portfolio: Business Capability Planning, Application Migration & Rationalization, Technology Risk Management, and Information Usage.

With this level of visibility, architects can easily identify transformational opportunities, whether that’s reducing the number of on-premise or duplicate apps, reducing spend on non-critical applications or addressing gaps in the business capability model.

As APM provides both the technology and work perspective, architects can easily assess the impact of any changes on the architectural state. APM also ensures what is being planned is aligned with the technology and strategic goals of the organization.

The feature of ServiceNow APM:

• APM portal: Make decisions with actionable, real-time insights on a consolidated interface.

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• Application portfolio: Make data‑driven decisions on whether to invest, sustain, or replace your business applications.

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• Capability mapping: Align technology investments and services to business value streams via capability-based planning.

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• Technology portfolio management: Manage technology risk by monitoring the versions and lifecycles that run critical business apps.

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To learn more about ServiceNow APM please click here.