Managing the Technology Reference Model in Enterprise Architecture Workspace
Summarize
Summary of Managing the Technology Reference Model in Enterprise Architecture Workspace
The Technology Reference Model (TRM) feature in the Enterprise Architecture Workspace allows ServiceNow customers to define and enforce standards for software and hardware products used within their organization. This capability helps mitigate risks such as security vulnerabilities, delivery challenges, and legal issues arising from unapproved or outdated technology usage. By managing TRM products and their lifecycles, customers can maintain compliance, reduce technical debt, and improve governance over technology assets.
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Key Features
- TRM Product Management: View and manage lists of TRM products grouped by category. Request new TRM products or product lifecycles, and approve or reject these requests to maintain control over technology standards.
- Product Lifecycle Tracking: Associate lifecycle phases (e.g., approved, unapproved, evaluation) with TRM products to track their usage status and compliance over time.
- Integration with Software Asset Management (SAM): Leverage SAM integration to select or fetch software products and versions for the TRM library, or define custom products when SAM is unavailable.
- Architectural Artifact Association: Link architectural artifacts to TRM products to enrich governance and documentation within the Enterprise Architecture Workspace.
- Product Capability Management: Create, associate, or remove product capabilities linked to TRM products to ensure relevance and accuracy of technology standards.
- Data Export and Synchronization: Export TRM product category data to Excel or CSV for stakeholder sharing or analysis. Schedule jobs to sync TRM product names with linked SAM software products for consistency.
- Wildcard Lifecycle Updates: Use wildcards in TRM lifecycles to efficiently update multiple software product versions without specifying exact minor versions.
- Technical Debt Management: Identify and manage technical debt related to unapproved TRM products to improve security posture and reduce organizational risk.
What to Expect
By implementing the TRM in Enterprise Architecture Workspace, organizations gain clear visibility into approved technology standards and their lifecycle states. This enhances governance by assigning accountability through TRM category owners responsible for maintaining compliance. Customers can proactively identify unauthorized software usage within business applications, thus safeguarding against security, delivery, and legal risks. Overall, managing the TRM helps improve technology consistency, reduces costs, minimizes technical debt, and strengthens the organization's security and compliance frameworks.
You can use the Technology Reference Model (TRM) feature in Enterprise Architecture Workspace to define the standards for your software and hardware products and manage unapproved products in your organization.
Overview and benefits of a TRM
- Security risks: The software might be exposed to security issues.
- Delivery risks: There might not be sufficient knowledge on how to support the software.
- Legal risks: A business application might use the software in illegal ways.
You must define the standards for the software that is to be used and the software versions that are permitted for use in your organization. Also, you need a way to explore when a non-permitted software is being used within the organization and in which business applications.
- View a list of all available TRM products. You can also view the list of TRM products grouped by product category.
- Request a TRM product
- Request a TRM product lifecycle
- Create a TRM product
- Create a TRM product lifecycle
- Approve or reject TRM product and product lifecycle requests.
Using the TRM module, you can manage the standards of the technology and set the right guardrail for technology usage. Setting the standards can improve the technical debt, security posture and save costs for the organization.
You can also assign an owner to a TRM category, to ensure clear accountability and improved governance standards. The owner is responsible for maintaining consistent technology compliance standards for that TRM category.
TRM Product Lifecycle
Each product in the TRM library is associated with a set of life-cycle phases with a start and end date. The life-cycle phases could be approved, unapproved, approved with constraints, Divest, and evaluation.
The TPM home page fetches all the business applications that are being used in your organization. It helps to review the status of the software that is being used. You can understand if any business application is using the software that is not part of the TRM or a software version that is not approved for production. For more information, see TRM lifecycle timelines on Gantt chart.
The TRM module uses a similar module to TPM to search in the TRM library. You can view the software that is part of the TRM library, and initiate a request to add the software or software version to the TRM library.
You can also use the TRM with the Software Asset Management (SAM) plugin. This plugin helps you to fetch or select the products and versions for the TRM library. You can also define your own software products when the Software Asset Management integration module isn’t available for your instance.