Managing requests, certifications, assessments, and technology portfolio audit
Summarize
Summary of Managing requests, certifications, assessments, and technology portfolio audit
This guide is designed for Enterprise Architects to manage requests, certifications, assessments, and technology portfolio audits effectively within the Application Portfolio Management module. It highlights how to track and oversee various elements crucial for maintaining an up-to-date business application inventory.
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Key Features
- My Requests: Displays requests assigned to you as an approver, with options to view detailed records for approval or rejection.
- Certifications: Lists certifications needing updates for business applications, ensuring data accuracy essential for application assessments.
- Assessments: Provides a platform to evaluate applications based on qualitative metrics, allowing for the creation of custom indicators as needed.
- Technology Portfolio Audit: Offers insights into the lifecycle status of software and hardware products, identifying gaps in lifecycle data and enabling risk assessment through scheduled jobs.
- Technical Debt: Tracks TRM technical debts associated with products that do not meet TRM standards, detailing the reasons behind these debts and their implications.
Key Outcomes
By utilizing these features, ServiceNow customers can ensure their application portfolio remains compliant and optimized, leading to:
- Improved accuracy in application assessments and decision-making.
- Enhanced visibility into the lifecycle status of technology assets.
- Effective management of technical debts and associated risks.
As an Enterprise Architect, you can manage all requests. You can view the status of the certifications, assessments, and technology portfolio audit information.
My requests
The My Requests tab shows the list of requests assigned to you as an approver. By default, it shows all the requests as a paginated result. Select View All to see the full list. You can open a request record by selecting it to approve or reject the request.
Certifications
The Certifications tab shows the list of certifications and their status. You must keep your business applications inventory up to date by certifying the data in the business applications table periodically. Keeping your business application data current helps you to assess your business applications precisely as there are indicators that are dependent on these business applications.
You can select View All to see the list of certifications. Select the certification number, certification schedule, and certification instance to see more details.
Assessments
The Assessments tab shows the list of assessments for your applications that help you to evaluate and score your business applications based on qualitative inputs. Application indicators are business metrics that assess the applications across dimensions such as cost, quality, technical risk, investments, user satisfaction, and business value.
Each indicator periodically captures related application data that is used to calculate the application score. The assessment of applications is done on an extensible framework, which is based on the various configured indicators. If you require indicators other than the preconfigured ones to calculate the application score, then you can create an indicator based on your business requirements.
You can select View All to see the list of assessments. Select the assessment number and metric type to see more details.
Technology Portfolio audit
The Technology Portfolio Audit tab shows audit information for your applications. An entry in this table indicates that at least one lifecycle for that software product or hardware model was either approximated, or not found, or doesn’t exist. For example, if the software product full version is 9.2.1, it may be that the End of Support lifecycle version in the Software Asset Management Content library was only full version 9.2. This audit table helps you to evaluate the lifecycle matching information based on the details of the products being used in your organization. The table helps you to identify whenever an exact lifecycle version match or no valid lifecycle version could be found against the software product or hardware model version used in your organization.
The data in the Technology Portfolio Audit table is fetched from the TPM Technology Lifecycle Exception [sn_apm_tpm_technology_lifecycle_exception] table.
As an admin user, you can run the Populate TPM Discovered Technologies and Lifecycles scheduled job on-demand to calculate the technology lifecycle risk for your application portfolio. The scheduled job executes the script generating the lifecycle risk dates including end of support date, end of extended support date, and end of life date for your software products and hardware models by querying the ITAM content library. For more details, see Schedule a job to generate TPM lifecycle data and Run a scheduled job to generate TPM lifecycle data. Whether the script runs on demand or scheduled, you can view the results in the Portfolio > Technology Portfolio Management > Logs page.
| Column name | Description |
|---|---|
| Type | Application type. Choices are:
|
| Software product | Name of the software product. |
| Product version | Version number of the product. |
| Product edition | Edition of the product. For example, Standard. |
| Product full version | Full version of the product. |
| Hardware model | Hardware model that is associated with the software product. |
| Verification status | Verification status of the product. Choices are:
|
| Comments | Customer comments. |
| Lifecycle phase | Lifecycle phase of the product. |
| Phase start date | Lifecycle phase start date. |
| Edition | Edition of the lifecycle. |
| Full version | Full version of the lifecycle. |
| Match notes | Notes by the customer. |
| Technology lifecycle | TPM technology lifecycle information of the software product or hardware model. |
Technical Debt
The Technical Debt tab shows the list of TRM technical debt that are created for the products that are not aligned with the TRM phases and standards. A technical debt indicates either there is no TRM product record for a software product used by one or more business application or the TRM product has one or more internal lifecycle phases that restrict its usage.. In this table, you can view the TRM products and associated business applications details, and the reason for the technical debt. A custom scheduled job Populate TRM technical debts in the EA Workspace runs and creates an entry in the TRM Technical Debt table. For more details, see Manage TRM technical debt and Run a scheduled job to update TRM technical debt data in EA Workspace.
| Column name | Description |
|---|---|
| TRM product | Name of the TRM product. A software product that is having version specific life cycles. |
| Business Application | Name of the business application associated with the TRM product. |
| Software product model | Name of the software product model related to the TRM product. |
| TRM phase | Phase of the TRM product. The following TRM phases are available from the base system:
Note: You can modify these phases from the EA Workspace > Setup > TRM Phases page. |
| TRM level | The level (Product or Product Lifecycle) at which the technical debt is created. |
| Version | Version of the software product. Usually, the name of the Software product model contains this version. |
| Reason | The reason to explain why the technical debt was created. |
| Last run | Shows the time stamp when the custom scheduled job Populate TRM technical debts in the EA Workspace is run to update the table with technical debt. |