Technology Portfolio Management (TPM) Best Practices

Overview

Technology Spread analysis is not simply counting how many applications use each technology. It is a multi-dimensional analytical discipline that reveals the strategic, financial, and risk implications of the adoption patterns embedded in the APM-TPM connection. Three specific analytical outputs of Technology Spread analysis consistently produce governance insights that surprise organizations conducting this analysis for the first time and produce actionable intelligence for those that conduct it continuously.

Best Practice

Apply Technology Spread analysis to produce three categories of portfolio intelligence as standard TPM governance outputs. Adoption concentration analysis maps every technology to its full set of application dependencies, qualified by those applications’ business criticality, Rationalization Posture, and Strategic Disposition. Technologies used by a single low-criticality application with an Eliminate posture represent a rationalization opportunity. Technologies used by dozens of high-criticality applications with Invest and Move-To dispositions represent a strategic platform warranting significant governance investment. Hidden ubiquity analysis identifies technologies that appear minor in the Technologies Inventory but are discovered, when the adoption data across the full application portfolio is aggregated, to be present in a significantly larger number of applications than any governance stakeholder recognized. Strategic leverage point analysis identifies technologies whose governance investment will produce the greatest portfolio-wide return because they are foundational to the broadest and most strategically important application dependencies.

Benefit(s)

Technology Spread analysis consistently produces three types of governance value. It prevents expensive surprises — EOL announcements and security disclosures that would otherwise trigger emergency portfolio-wide discovery exercises are processed within a governance framework that already knows which applications are affected. It surfaces rationalization opportunities and rationalization challenges before they are discovered under time pressure. And it provides the portfolio-level financial analysis that makes technology investment decisions compellingly justifiable to financial leadership.