Technology Portfolio Management (TPM) Best Practices

Overview

The Technology Standards Register is the governance output of the Technologies Inventory and assessment process. It is the authoritative organizational record of every technology the organization has taken a formal position on: the technologies that are Approved for new use, the technologies that are Tolerated for existing use only but not recommended for new projects, the technologies that are Under Evaluation in the Emerging and Experimental Technologies Inventory, the technologies that are Deprecated and should not be adopted but are maintained for existing uses until migration is complete, and the technologies that are Prohibited and must not be used under any circumstances. Every team making a technology decision should consult the Standards Register as a first step, and every technology decision that falls outside the Approved category should require explicit governance authorization.

Best Practice

Establish the Technology Standards Register as a formally governed document or system maintained by the TPM governance function and made accessible to all teams across the organization. The Standards Register should capture for each entry: the technology name and semantic identifier from the Technologies Inventory; the taxonomy category and sub-category; the Standards Register status (Approved, Tolerated, Under Evaluation, Deprecated, or Prohibited); the date of the current status assignment; the governance body or individual responsible for the status assignment; the rationale for the current status; the conditions or restrictions that apply to the status (for example, Approved for greenfield development only, or Tolerated for existing use in legacy systems only); and the next review date.

Connect the Standards Register directly to the Technologies Inventory so that every technology record in the inventory carries a current Standards Register status as a standard attribute. The Standards Register is not a separate document that must be manually synchronized with the inventory — it is a governed attribute of every technology record that is updated through the same governance process that updates all other technology record attributes.

Benefit(s)

The Technology Standards Register gives every team making a technology decision a clear, authoritative reference that removes the ambiguity about which technologies the organization supports, tolerates, or prohibits. The governance overhead of individual technology decisions decreases because the answer to “is this technology approved?” is accessible without requiring a separate architecture review for every inquiry. Architecture governance capacity is focused on the decisions that genuinely require it — new technology evaluations, exception requests, and disposition changes — rather than on answering repetitive inquiries about technologies already in the Standards Register.