Managing Technology From Cradle to Grave

Challenges that come with Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) in the Enterprise Architecture department are not unique to any organization.

You’re always working on keeping the Tech Portfolio efficient and cost-effective. The challenge with M&A, of course, is the acquisition of redundant technologies. Therefore, rationalizing the Technology Portfolio, and deciding what to standardize on vs. what to retire is an ongoing challenge.

Keeping your EA portfolio organized is like keeping your garage structured and consistent. This way, when you need a tool, you want to be able to find it easily. But if you cannot find it, because you've misplaced it – you end up buying another one.

Enterprise Architecture and M&A

More so than ever, we have the need for Enterprise Architecture in M&A. To address this need, one of our customers quickly realized the importance of:

1. Having all your portfolios in a single place. This idea has been around forever, and for a good reason.
2. You could integrate the tools you use for architecture, planning and roadmapping, transformation management, etc. But that comes with its own risk, however, if you already have a platform like ServiceNow used in-house for ITSM, then it just makes sense to have all of the Architectural information in there, too.

When looking for a mature Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) solution, the Enterprise Architecture team there found ins-pi and immediately saw that it was the complete picture of what they were looking for:

• Technology Portfolio Management and Governance
• Automated workflows supporting standards approval lifecycles
• Business Architecture
• Applications Portfolio

access THE WHOLE STORY

Primary Focus of the Enterprise Architecture Team

Managing technology from cradle to grave was the main focus of the Enterprise Architecture team.

They have internally already developed the concept of TAP (Technical Asset Portfolio). Today, the Enterprise Architecture team has 14 of those groups. They’re very high level, and all they are are buckets – technology groupings. Each TAP group has an owner assigned, and multiple people in that group have the responsibility to ensure governance and ownership of every product in the TAP group. (Read our blog on Governance here.)

They get a notification through UPM-X’s workflow indicating that they have a new product – and this all is managed throughout the whole lifecycle. This is all assessed on a yearly basis. Then, followed by an evaluation and recommendation of:

1. tolerate
2. invest
3. migrate
4. eliminate.

This has been a game-changer in how Governance is done for the Enterprise Architecture team at this organization.

Maturing the CMDB

It took our customer 10 years of trying to mature their CMDB. So when they invested in UPM-X, what it did for them was force them to conform to a standard metamodel.

UPM-X demonstrated the best practice for their use-case: which was how their Business Application is defined, and then show a Software Product and an installed instance of that Business Application. This way, the CMDB had matured, and they could do in 6 months what they couldn’t do in 10 years!

Watch what our customer's approach to managing Technology from cradle to grave was on-demand now:

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Learn more about the Enterprise Architecture solution mentioned in this blog post: