What Does Your Technology Portfolio Look Like?

by Jeff Tash

What do you see when you look at all those IT products and computer applications you’ve invested in over the years? Are they leaking oil? Spitting gas? Spewing smoke? Unfortunately, after all the many repeated budget cuts and layoffs that IT has had to endure over the past several years, that depiction of a technology portfolio in chaos, nowadays, that’s probably closer to the norm rather than the exception.

We’ve just come through the worst economic recession in the IT industry’s 50+ year long history. Today, everyone, everywhere, is anxiously awaiting the next technology growth spurt, knowing the up tick is invariably coming, but still not quite sure exactly where it will happen, or when it will start.

Enterprises in the past have expended massive sums of money purchasing technology. Yet, precious few IT organizations can even tell you what technology is currently being used, let alone where, or by whom. Is this simply another case of the cobbler’s children wearing no shoes?

The main problem is that information about technology assets generally is locked up inside taxonomies organized by “project” and not by “product.” Products are typically purchased using funds allocated on a project-by-project basis. Someone has to pay for a purchase. The custom has been whichever project needs a new product first is the one that incurs the cost. But without a technology portfolio, there’s no place for different projects to share information about which products are being used. Since each project tends to be unique, outside visitors frequently would find it quite difficult to navigate an unfamiliar project’s taxonomy, assuming people from outside a project have any access privileges assigned in the first place.

Because technology portfolios are organized by technology categories, as opposed to by project categories, information about different products (i.e., technology assets) can readily be shared across multiple project teams.

As it turns out, many technology investments are actually quite risky. Often what gets purchased eventually winds up sitting idle and unused for various and sundry reasons. In other cases, especially after mergers and acquisitions, the technology landscape resembles a smorgasbord of products amidst a jungle of incompatible architectures that collectively cost a bundle to maintain and support. Sometimes the problem is that too few people are using a very expensive technology -- too few to justify its high cost. Other times the challenge is in persuading different groups spread out across the organization to agree to standardize on a single version of a product in order to cut down on overall maintenance and support costs.

Tracking technology investments has become much more difficult since the shift to distributed, de-centralized computing environments. But even more problematic has been the lack of cooperation, collaboration, and communication that typically occurs between IT and the vast network of end users who interact daily with IT products and IT systems.

What IT needs is a systematic way of managing its enterprise’s technology portfolio. This means explaining to an expansive and diverse user community what IT’s current and future architectures, standards, and strategies are all about. Another way to think about a technology portfolio is to imagine its role as providing a way for IT to “market” its capabilities to internal customers throughout the enterprise.

Note that a technology portfolio is NOT the same as an enterprise architecture. The latter pertains to a multi-layer model, such as John Zachman’s Framework, where different layers correspond to conceptual, logical, physical, technological, and functional levels of architectural information. An enterprise architecture tries to support all types of “meta” information. This meta information essentially consists of application artifacts -- i.e., the output produced by any of the full spectrum of products that get used at various points along the entire range of a system’s lifecycle -- from project inception all the way through to its eventual sunset.

A technology portfolio, by comparison, is far more modest in its goals. Think of technology portfolio as that slice of enterprise architecture that pertains to “technology architecture.” Its principle purpose is to describe which products are being used, where, and by whom. Perhaps equally important is its ability to track which products actually get used together in combination since software complexity is often a direct function of the number of different interoperating products.

Managing your technology portfolio is the first step toward building an agile enterprise. Providing easy, shared access to product knowledge and technical resources is a great way to leverage your technology investments and reuse product skills across projects. That’s a great strategy -- one guaranteed to always deliver winning results!