Digital Portfolios

Soon, almost all enterprises will be digital. The smart, quick running start-ups of today will start to feel the pains of maturity as they expand the range of activities that they are involved in and the markets in which they operate. The old world survivors which have adapted will also feel the pain as their IT or should we now say Digital Estates become increasingly complex.

As this happens, many of them will start to appreciate the need for Portfolio Management of their Digital Assets. The constant churn of Digital as Usual (DAU) means that almost everything will be obsolete or approaching obsolescence and business requirements will keep changing. Enterprises will need to continuously assess their portfolio and prioritise improvements, changes and rationalisation, as well as the response to threats and changing legislation as governments react to Digital Disruption in a number of ways.

Anyone responsible for providing Digital Services to their enterprise needs to be able to deal with this and the complexity which lies underneath, so that they can spend wisely and assign resources for the most optimum effect. To do this requires a high degree of collaboration with other business functions to ensure that a balanced and appropriate approach is taken. This is where Digital Asset Portfolio Management (DAPM) comes in.

At its very simplest, DAPM is about Business Quality, Technical Quality and Affordability. These 3 things need to be monitored and continuously managed through the layers of a Digital Product. The key layers being Customer & Business Environment, End-to-End Product Process, Applications, Data, Infrastructure (cloud, virtual &/or physical).

Changes in Customer expectations, business trends, legislation etc. can impact the overall Digital Product's relevance, market fit and legality. This is a major aspect of business quality and will imply the need for change to End-to-End Product Processes. Although Product Processes may also be impacted by other issues such as changes in volume, ability to deal with increasing product complexity, scarcity of resources or competition (in performance terms) with other products in the market place (i.e. the bench mark suddenly shifts and your process has been left behind). Likewise, applications may fail to keep pace with changing needs. Data may become corrupted or inadequate due to poor information management or a bad fit between the data and the real needs of the business. Infrastructure gradually becomes obsolete, difficult to support or integrate, and weaknesses in security become apparent.

All this gets even more complicated if mergers happen and applications become duplicated, or technical strategy changes introduce new technical platforms into the enterprise.

One of the key things that DAPM has to do, is identify all the major components required to deliver a digital product (including containers and serverless functions) and keep track of their condition and costs. This allows the calculation of unit costs to support a product transaction and enables investments to be assessed in terms of not just impact on quality and effect, but also the on cost of supporting a product.

A mature digital organisation needs to build DAPM into its budgeting and planning activities, and use this to inform its technical strategy. Alternatively, businesses with a huge legacy problem who want to transition to digital, may need to use DAPM to identify and prioritise which applications need to be retired, replaced or upgraded to enable their move.

However you look at it DAPM is an essential digital practice.