How to Use a Technology Portfolio to Slay the Change Dragon

by Jeff Tash

Change is not a constant. Change is, in fact, accelerating — growing exponentially. Are you ready for rapid technological change?

Don’t be fooled by today’s current economic slowdown. Technologies touching IT are advancing at exponential speed. Besides Moore’s Law, which continues to deliver a doubling of transistor density every 18 months, we are on the brink of incredible technological breakthroughs in storage, communication, and de-coupled computing, to name but a few of the many technologies increasing at geometric rates of growth.

All technology investments are temporary. Value chains are constantly changing swiftly. Disruptive technologies occur every 8 – 12 years. The faster the clockspeed the more volatile your technology portfolio. 

You need to manage your technology portfolio like a financial portfolio. Hold onto winners. Get rid of losers. Eliminate underperforming investments. Identify underutilized systems. Leverage and re-invest in best products and best practices. View your technology portfolio investments as an opportunity to achieve competitive advantage.

Want action steps you can take right away to gain control of your technology portfolio? Start by defining a taxonomy -- a way of capturing, classifying, and categorizing information about your technology portfolio. Then, use that taxonomy to catalog what you have in your existing technology portfolio. That is, what people in your organization are currently using -- what you’ve already invested in. Start with your infrastructure which includes your clientware, serverware, middleware, manageware, and platforms. But that’s not enough. Infrastructure -- by itself -- pretty much just sits there and does nothing. The real value of infrastructure only comes after you layer applications on top. Applications can either be built or applications can be bought. And, regardless of whether you make or buy, your applications will generate data that can be mined for business intelligence. Your taxonomy will need to be able to effectively organize all of this information as well.

As you catalog your products, you should plan to establish, communicate, and enforce your internal IT standards. As you classify you’ll likely discover that your enterprise already supports inconsistent standards across different business units, or across different geographic regions. The presence of different standards need not be a problem so long as you’re documenting which standards apply where inside your technology portfolio. 

The same system that communicates internal IT standards can also be used to channel pertinent information to increase IT productivity. Make the best users of your best products more productive and you will increase your overall organizational productivity. Support your best and brightest by providing access to the information they need to grow and develop their own personal skills and competencies. Also share this information with others so that everyone can benefit.

Complexity in computing is directly proportional to product interoperability. The more products that need to interoperate, the greater the complexity. Your technology portfolio needs to capture and reflect combinations of products that get used together. You need to specify collections of tools associated with applications, design patterns, configurations, toolkits, projects, etc. Imagine each of these collections as a rich tapestry of different products woven together -- reflecting sets of tools that interoperate.

One way to reduce an IT budget is to consolidate -- eliminating redundant products (different tools that provide overlapping functionality). Total cost of ownership (TCO) far exceeds the price of product acquisition. There’s always a huge increase in both cost and complexity whenever an organization has to support multiple similar products.

Version control, as you’d expect, is another critical element of technology portfolio management. Each product has its own lifecycle -- its own sequence of new product releases. Moreover, every collection requires its own versioning mechanism too. 

Finally, in order to ensure success, ongoing maintenance of your technology portfolio must be institutionalized and made part of your organization’s business processes.

The primary purpose of a technology portfolio is to communicate what you have -- and then to guide the evaluation and analysis of where to invest next. A technology portfolio is like a Rosetta Stone -- it provides the glue that unifies global IT communities. 

By adopting standards -- and facilitating the easy sharing of knowledge across groups of users who share common experiences because they work with common tools -- a technology portfolio provides the foundation upon which rests the rest of your enterprise architecture. 

The beauty of a technology portfolio is how simple, concrete and practical the approach is. This contrasts markedly with enterprise architecture which is complex, abstract and complicated. A technology portfolio puts a foundation in place -- a groundwork. Best of all, it’s fast. You can see results in a matter of weeks. Effective and efficient. Excellent.