Managing requests, certifications, and assessments

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 5 minutes to read
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    Summary of Managing requests, certifications, and assessments

    This content guides Enterprise Architects on managing requests, certifications, assessments, and audits within the Enterprise Architecture (EA) Workspace in ServiceNow. It details how to handle approvals, maintain accurate business application data, evaluate applications through assessments, audit technology lifecycles, and manage technical debt related to technology risk management (TRM).

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    Managing Requests and Approvals

    • My Approvals: Displays requests awaiting your approval.
    • My Requests: Shows all requests assigned to you as an approver, with options to view and take action directly.
    • Enterprise Architects can approve or reject TRM product, lifecycle, and modeling diagram requests submitted by others.
    • Users can view, edit, and manage approvers for their product and lifecycle requests, tracking request statuses effectively.

    Certifications

    Maintaining an up-to-date business applications inventory is critical. The Certifications tab lists certifications with their current status to help ensure your business application data is accurate, which supports precise assessments and dependent indicators.

    • Certification data sources depend on your EA Workspace version and may require migration of certification policies.
    • Detailed views are available by selecting certification numbers, schedules, or instances.

    Assessments

    The Assessments tab provides a framework to evaluate and score business applications based on qualitative inputs and configured application indicators such as cost, quality, risk, investment, user satisfaction, and business value.

    • Indicators collect periodic data to calculate scores.
    • You can create custom indicators beyond the preconfigured ones to fit specific business requirements.
    • Assessment details are accessible by selecting assessment numbers and metric types.

    Technology Portfolio Audit

    This audit identifies software products or hardware models with lifecycle mismatches or missing lifecycle information, critical for managing technology risks.

    • Data is sourced from the TPM Technology Lifecycle Exception table.
    • Admins can run scheduled jobs to calculate lifecycle risk dates (end of support, end of life, etc.) by querying the IT Asset Management content library.
    • Results are viewable in the Technology Portfolio Management logs.
    • The audit helps ensure lifecycle phases are accurate and verified, facilitating risk mitigation.

    Technical Debt

    The Technical Debt tab highlights TRM-related issues where software products are misaligned with TRM phases or standards, signaling potential risks.

    • Technical debt entries indicate missing TRM product records or lifecycle restrictions.
    • Information includes TRM product details, associated business applications, product versions, phases, and reasons for debt.
    • A custom scheduled job populates this table to keep data current.
    • You can update verification statuses for product lifecycles directly in the TPM lifecycle exception table.

    Applying Filters and Navigation

    • Filters can be applied to the Portfolio Overview and Health section, updating interactive cards and graphs to display relevant business applications and capabilities.
    • Filter preferences are saved for future sessions, supporting personalized and efficient data views.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Streamlines approval workflows and request management for Enterprise Architects.
    • Ensures business application data integrity through regular certifications, improving assessment accuracy.
    • Provides actionable insights into application health, technical risks, and lifecycle compliance.
    • Supports proactive technology risk mitigation via lifecycle audits and technical debt tracking.
    • Enables customization of assessments and indicators to align with unique business needs.

    As an Enterprise Architect, you can manage all requests. You can view the status of the certifications, assessments, and technology portfolio audit information.

    My approvals

    The My Approvals tab lists the requests that are waiting for your approval.

    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.

    If you have directly installed the 4.0.0 version of the EA Workspace store application, the data in the Certifications table is fetched from the CMDB Data Management Task (cmdb_data_management_task) table.

    If you upgraded your EA Workspace from a previous version to the 4.0.0 version, you may see that your certification data is still fetched from the Certification Schedules (cert_schedule) table. In this case, you must migrate your certification policies to the CMDB Data Management Certification Policies (sn_cmdb_ws_dm_certification_policy) table. For more information, see Import certification schedules in to Data Managerand Publish a draft Data Manager policy.

    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.

    Table 1. Technology portfolio audit table
    Column name Description
    Type Application type. Choices are:
    • Software
    • Hardware
    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:
    • Need to verify
    • Verified
    • Rejected
    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.

    Table 2. Technical Debt table
    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:
    • Approved: The technology is approved for use.
    • Approved with Constraints: The technology can be used within the specified constraints specified in the comments.
    • Divest: A decision was taken to divest from the use of the technology.
    • Evaluation: This technology is being evaluated and can’t be used to production purposes.
    • Unapproved: The technology isn’t permitted to be used.
    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.