Technology Portfolio Management (TPM) Best Practices

Overview

The Service Catalog is the authoritative record of the IT services the organization provides to its business stakeholders — the user-facing capabilities, the operational functions, and the shared platform services that IT delivers in support of business operations. Technologies are the infrastructure beneath those services: every service in the Service Catalog is built on a set of technology components drawn from the Technologies Inventory family. The connection between the Technologies Inventory and the Service Catalog makes the technology dependency of every IT service explicit, enabling two governance capabilities that neither inventory provides alone: impact analysis of technology lifecycle decisions on service availability, and service-level framing of technology portfolio decisions that makes them comprehensible and consequential to business stakeholders.

Best Practice

Establish and maintain a connection between the Technologies Inventory family and the Service Catalog that links every service to the technology components on which it depends. In the Service Catalog, every service record should reference the Technologies Inventory semantic identifiers of the technology components that are material to its delivery. In the Technologies Inventory, the Technology Spread data for each technology should include not only the applications that depend on it but also the services that those applications enable, creating a technology-to-service impact chain that governance decisions can traverse.

Use the technology-to-service connection to perform service impact analysis for significant technology lifecycle decisions before they are executed. When a technology is proposed for deprecation or retirement, generate the impact chain from that technology through its dependent applications to the services those applications enable, and present the service impact — the specific services whose availability or capability will be affected by the technology lifecycle change — to the governance body reviewing the deprecation decision. This framing converts technology governance decisions from technical architecture choices into service delivery decisions that business stakeholders have standing to evaluate and that IT leadership has accountability to address.

Benefit(s)

The Service Catalog connection produces technology governance intelligence that is immediately comprehensible to business stakeholders who have limited context for technical architecture decisions but clear accountability for the services their business domains depend on. Technology lifecycle decisions presented in terms of their service impact produce business stakeholder engagement that technology-centric presentations of the same decisions do not. Business leaders who understand which services will be affected by a technology deprecation decision can evaluate the business priority and timing of that decision in terms that are meaningful to their operational accountability, rather than being asked to approve technical decisions they cannot independently evaluate.