Technology Portfolio Management (TPM) Best Practices

Overview

Enterprise Architecture (or its equivalent such as Enterprise Engineering) defines the target state — the architecture the organization is working toward, the principles that govern all architectural decisions, and the standards that express those principles in terms of specific technology choices and patterns. Technology Portfolio Management operationalizes that target state in the Technologies Inventories, the Technology Standards Register, and the Technology Rationalization Posture and Strategic Disposition assignments that express the organization’s intent for every technology in the portfolio. The relationship between EA and TPM is the relationship between direction and governance: EA sets the direction, and TPM governs the portfolio’s movement toward it.

Best Practice

Align the TPM governance framework explicitly with the EA target state architecture and architecture principles, and establish EA — or an equivalent enterprise-spanning architectural function such as Engineering — as the recommended owner of the TPM discipline. Enterprise Architecture is the recommended owner of TPM for the same reasons it is the recommended owner of the enterprise environment taxonomy in the IF4IT IT Operating Environments Best Practices document and the recommended owner of APM governance in the IF4IT Application Portfolio Management Best Practices document: it has the cross-organizational mandate, the architectural perspective, and the governance relationships with business leadership and technology teams that effective technology portfolio governance requires.

The Technology Standards Register should be the primary output document through which EA communicates its technology decisions to the organization. Additions to and removals from the Standards Register should go through the Architecture Review Board or Technology Review Board as the governance body with the authority and the organizational standing to make those decisions consequential. The technology lifecycle defined in TPM — Emerging, Evaluating, Approved, Strategic, Sustained, Deprecated, Prohibited, Retired — should directly reflect the EA’s current position on each technology relative to the target state architecture. A technology that is part of the target state architecture carries a Strategic or Approved lifecycle status. A technology that is not part of the target state and has no migration path to it carries a Deprecated or Prohibited status.

IMPORTANT: Owning the TPM function does not explicitly mean owning the actual technologies that appear in and are managed by the TPM function. For example, the IT Portfolio Owner may own specific technical assets within his or her portfolio, while engineering may own others, and EA may own others. TPM is about tracking the technologies themselves, establishing and tracking their lifecycles, understanding their owners, helping to negotiate and work with their vendors, and tracking and managing other key traits about the technologies.

Benefit(s)

When TPM governance is aligned with and owned by Enterprise Architecture, technology standard decisions are made with the architectural perspective and organizational authority they require to be consistently implemented. Technology portfolio decisions reflect the organization’s actual architectural direction rather than the preferences of individual teams or the capabilities of available tooling. Architecture principles are operationalized in the Technologies Inventories in a form that development teams can act on — the Standards Register tells them which technologies to use and which to avoid, grounded in the architectural rationale that the EA function is responsible for providing.