Application Portfolio Management (APM) Best Practices

Overview

One of the most powerful and underappreciated properties of the Tier 1 inventories — particularly the Integrations Inventory — is their capacity to seed and continuously enrich Tier 2 inventories without requiring those inventories to be built from scratch through independent data collection efforts. Every integration record declares a source entity type and identifier, a target entity type and identifier, a transport technology, and a data payload type. These declarations, aggregated across the full Integrations Inventory, surface every entity class that participates in data flows across the enterprise.

Best Practice

Recognize that the following Tier 2 inventories can be seeded, at least partially, from Tier 1 inventory records — and plan the inventory expansion roadmap accordingly.

The Technologies Inventory, which is the primary inventory of the Technology Portfolio Management discipline, can be seeded from two sources in the Tier 1 inventories: the Technology Profile attribute of every Application record (which lists the technologies each application uses) and the Transport Technology attribute of every Integration record (which lists the technologies used to implement each integration). Co-govern the Technologies Inventory with TPM. Refer to the IF4IT Technology Portfolio Management Best Practices document as the governing source.

The Environments Inventory, which is the primary inventory of the IT Operating Environments discipline, can be partially seeded from the Deployment Environment and Hosting Model attributes of Application records and from the Source and Target Environment attributes of Integration records. Co-govern with IT Operating Environments. Refer to the IF4IT IT Operating Environments Best Practices document as the governing source.

The Data and Information Assets Inventory can be seeded from the Data Types attribute of Application records and the Payload Data Type attribute of Integration records. Every unique data type that appears across these attributes is a candidate entry in the Data and Information Assets Inventory. Human curation enriches these seed records with governance attributes, ownership, classification details, and retention obligations.

A family of derived entity inventories can be seeded from the Source and Target Entity Type and Identifier attributes of Integration records. Every unique entity that appears as an integration source or target — with its entity type — seeds its corresponding inventory: Databases, Message Queues, Topics and Event Streams, File Systems and Object Storage, External Entities, Human Roles and Actors, Services and APIs, and Processes and Jobs. These inventories start as lightweight lists derived from integration records and are enriched with governance attributes, cost data, and operational details as the program matures. Architecture diagrams, data flow diagrams, and system context diagrams fed to AI tools can further accelerate the population and reconciliation of these derived inventories.

The Vendors and Suppliers Inventory can be partially derived from the Primary Vendor attribute of Application records, enriched with commercial relationship data as the program matures.

Benefit(s)

Treating Tier 2 inventories as derivable from Tier 1 means the organization’s investment in governing the Tier 1 inventories well compounds in value over time — each well-governed integration record contributes simultaneously to the Integrations Inventory, to the Technologies Inventory, to the Environments Inventory, to the Data and Information Assets Inventory, and to the entity-type-specific derived inventories. The intelligence return on Tier 1 governance investment far exceeds what any single inventory can deliver in isolation.