Technology Portfolio Management (TPM) Best Practices

Overview

The market for technology portfolio management tools encompasses a wide range of products — from enterprise architecture platforms that include technology portfolio management as one module among many, to dedicated IT Asset Management platforms that emphasize hardware lifecycle tracking, to FinOps platforms that focus on cloud financial management, to configuration management database systems that track operational technology assets. Each of these product categories addresses a relevant dimension of technology portfolio governance, and each is frequently marketed as a comprehensive TPM solution. None of them is. The governance disciplines described in this document — the full family of Technologies Inventories, the assessment framework with primary and secondary dimensions, the Rationalization Posture and Strategic Disposition governance, the open source governance program, the sustainability governance, the vendor management disciplines — are not provided by any single commercial platform available in the current market.

Figure: Example TPM Executive Dashboard

Best Practice

Develop a clear organizational understanding of what TPM tools are designed to do well and what they require the governance framework and human judgment to provide. TPM tools are effective at: storing and organizing technology inventory records at scale, enforcing data field requirements and data quality standards through structured data entry, automating discovery of deployed technologies through network scanning, agent-based discovery, and integration with existing operational data sources, generating portfolio-level reports and visualizations from the structured inventory data, and tracking lifecycle stage transitions and sending renewal and EOL alert notifications on a scheduled basis. TPM tools are not effective at, and should not be expected to replace: the governance framework definition, which determines what the inventory captures, how it is classified, and what governance standards apply; the assessment judgment, which determines how each technology scores on the primary and secondary assessment dimensions and what Rationalization Posture and Strategic Disposition it should carry; the organizational authority, which determines which assessments are accepted, which exceptions are approved, and which standards changes are adopted; and the strategic alignment, which connects the technology portfolio to the business strategy and enterprise architecture that the portfolio exists to serve. Tools support the governance framework; they do not replace it.

Benefit(s)

A clear organizational understanding of what TPM tools do and do not provide prevents the tool-selection and tool-implementation failure that most technology portfolio programs experience when they acquire a tool expecting it to deliver governance capabilities that only the governance framework and governance function can provide. Organizations that build the governance framework first and then select tools to support it consistently implement tools more successfully and extract more value from them than organizations that acquire tools and then attempt to reverse-engineer a governance framework from the tool’s capabilities.