Technology Portfolio Management (TPM) Best Practices

Overview

The connection between the Technologies Inventory family and the Applications Inventory is the most consequential integration in the TPM governance framework. It is the connection that produces Technology Spread — the data asset that reveals how every technology is actually adopted and used across the application portfolio. It is the connection that makes the bidirectional APM-TPM governance relationship real rather than theoretical. And it is the connection that transforms both the Technologies Inventories and the Applications Inventory from individually useful records into mutually validating, mutually enriching components of a connected portfolio intelligence system.

Best Practice

Establish and maintain the connection between the Technologies Inventory family and the Applications Inventory through the semantic identifiers that link each application record to the technology records for every technology in its stack. In the Applications Inventory, every application record should declare its technology stack using the semantic identifiers from the appropriate Technologies Inventory types: the programming languages it is written in, the frameworks and libraries it depends on, the database platforms it uses, the cloud services it is deployed on, and the significant open source components in its dependency tree. In the Technologies Inventory, every technology record should maintain its Technology Spread data as an aggregate view of all application records that reference it. The connection should be maintained bidirectionally and kept as current as the review cadence of the slower-updating inventory type.

Benefit(s)

The Applications Inventory connection produces the Technology Spread data that is the most strategically valuable output of the TPM-APM integration. Technology lifecycle decisions are informed by explicit knowledge of which applications they affect and how critical those applications are. Application rationalization decisions are informed by the