Here is what to Expect in Vancouver Release for APM

Keeping the tradition alive, here are the top 2 capabilities I think customers should pay attention to in the Vancouver release for ServiceNow Application Portfolio Management.

Business Application Lifecycle

This is a common ask that from many of my customers - how to best manage the lifecycle of the application. Although customers had the option of using existing capabilities and fields, with the new release the whole process of managing the lifecycle has been improved a lot.

With the new Application Lifecycle, owners of the applications can now manage the lifecycle in a much detailed way (for both internal and publisher lifecycles).

Some additional use-case can be (requires additional config):

1. Set up notifications to IT and Business application owners when the application is going into end-of-life.
2. Approval from the architecture board before the phases are approved and published.
3. Trigger to plan the next step for the application before it goes to end-of-life or end-of-support. This is a segway to the next new capability....

Planned Disposition

With the Planned Disposition set of fields, owners and architects can now maintain the decisions that they had made with the applications. This is something typically done during a license renewal or before the application goes for a major upgrade - do we want to continue to invest? Or shall we re-platform the whole solution. Or retire it?

Typically, these decisions regarding application disposition would be managed in excel files, or even worse - in emails and meeting minutes. With Vancouver, we are helping organisations to manage such critical decisions in a very structured way, so that it is easy for you to get the right information every time someone from the leadership asks for it, or when you need to plan the work for the upcoming months and quarters.

For Example, below is how the Replatform Migration Strategy for the application has been captured. We are also able to capture what the Target Business Application is in the migration activity.

And when these decisions are formalised, create a Demand right from the application to get the work prioritised and executed.

And when you manage these information structurally, you can easily pull up the list of applications that you need to discuss - may be with the Business Owners, Leadership or with the Architecture Review Board. You completely remove the need to frantically look and prepare the list at the last minute.

So what do you think? Will this help you to manage your application estate better? Share your thoughts in the comments.

There are a couple of additional enhancements related to Information Objects and EA Workspace (part of the Aug store release) and you will get all the detailed infromation in the release notes.