Go live - Application Portfolio Management for Dutch Railways (NS)

Recently we celebrated the Go Live of our project at The Dutch Railways (NS). For this project the objective was to create a single source of truth for all Business- and IT focused applications. We were able to get a better understanding in the usage and costs of Cloud, SaaS and On Premise applications used by The Dutch Railways.

Leveraging IT4IT and ServiceNow by managing Applications and their lifecycles

▶ Challenge

• Provide a single source of truth containing all Business- and IT focused applications
• Manage the lifecycle of all applications and integrate it with the IT4IT Service Backbone
• Provide insights in the portfolio of applications and their full stack in the CMDB including infra related costs
• Integrate the Application Portfolio with the Strategy, Goals and Architecture

▶ Solution

• We (as partner of KPN) co-created the NS IT4IT Solution Architecture, including Application
• Portfolio Management as a capability in the Strategy to Portfolio Value Stream and implemented it in ServiceNow
• Introduced a Single System of Record and System of Action for managing the Application Portfolio
• Introduced centralized ownership of Application Portfolio Management in the organization.
• Combining Application Portfolio Management with the Common Service Data Model (CSDM) provided by ServiceNow as a best practice. Seamless integration of APM, CSDM, CMDB and ITFM.
• Helping and coaching teams understanding and improving their current CMDB set-up.
• Sharing knowledge with teams on how to work with APM, CMDB and Enterprise Architecture tooling via awareness sessions, hands-on work sessions, reference guides and process documentation

▶ Results

• First step in an IT4IT guided program enabling more effective Portfolio Management in the Strategy to Portfolio Value Stream.
• Introduced a solid fundament that enables the organization to steer on IT costs and to be more cost efficient.
• Moved to a digital organization with a single source of truth and positioning data as an asset with dedicated owners. Moved away from Excel files containing different versions of application and service lists.
• Introduced a better understanding of the CMDB with APM resulting in numerous benefits, e.g. finding unused servers that are now decommissioned (costs reduction), introduced insights in Cloud and SaaS usage, application rationalization, improved data quality of the CMDB that resulted in first-time-right assignment of CI’s in incident management, and many more....

Photo by Marcus Loke on Unsplash