Application Portfolio Management (APM) Best Practices

Overview

The Configuration Management Database is one of the most important operational intelligence systems in a technology-driven enterprise. It tracks the configuration items - servers, software instances, network components, and their relationships - that make up the operational technology environment and the relationships between them. Enterprise inventories - particularly the Applications Inventory, the Computing Devices Inventory, and the Network Inventory - overlap significantly with CMDB scope. Organizations that maintain these inventories separately from the CMDB without a formal connection produce duplicated, inconsistent data that serves neither operational governance nor architectural governance well, and that forces teams to choose between two authoritative sources that should be presenting the same information but frequently do not.

Best Practice

Establish and maintain a formal, defined relationship between the APM Applications Inventory and the CMDB that clearly assigns authoritative source responsibility for shared attributes. The CMDB is typically the authoritative source for operational state - current deployment configuration, live infrastructure dependencies, operational relationship topology, and incident and change history. The Applications Inventory is typically the authoritative source for governance attributes - business ownership, strategic classification, business capability alignment, lifecycle status, financial data, and rationalization disposition. Define this assignment explicitly and implement synchronization or referencing mechanisms that keep both systems consistent with each other for the attributes they share. Ensure that application entries in the CMDB reference the corresponding Applications Inventory entry by semantic UID.

Benefit(s)

Connecting APM to the CMDB produces a unified view of the technology environment that serves both operational and architectural governance purposes from consistent, non-contradictory data. Operational teams have the business context and governance attributes that APM provides alongside the operational state data that the CMDB provides. Architectural teams have the operational configuration and relationship data that grounds their recommendations in operational reality. Impact analysis benefits from both perspectives simultaneously - combining the architectural and business context of APM with the operational configuration relationships of the CMDB to produce a complete picture of enterprise dependencies that neither system can provide alone.