Optimize Your Vision: Aligning Your IT Portfolio & Business Strategy

Optimize your vision
Aligning your IT portfolio &
business strategy

Teresa Spizzuco
Strategy Group, Casewise
PUBLISHED IN BUSINESSWEEK MARCH 07 EDITION
White Paper SUBJECT Aligning your IT portfolio & business strategy ONLINE http://www.casewise.com/products/ita-accelerator/ LEGAL © 2005 Casewise Lts. And/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved SUBJECT Aligning your IT portfolio & business strategy Page 1 ONLINE http://www.casewise.com/products/ita-accelerator/ LEGAL © 2005 Casewise Ltd and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Casewise disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Casewise shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The reader assumes sole responsibility for the selection of these materials to achieve its intended results. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. Optimize your vision
Aligning your IT portfolio &
business strategy
The problem
The rapid pace of change has forced many IT departments to evolve reactively, creating decentralized IT landscapes across organizations. As a result, today's CIO's, IT directors and managers are faced with a complex, often overwhelming, mesh of technologies and applications, often not aligned to IT projects or business strategies at all. This situation is expensive to maintain and difficult to understand and manage. Yet in today's competitive environment, executive management must understand the operation of their organization in order to make faster, cost-effective, IT investment decisions based on their core business strategies. Organizations are now beginning to tackle this problem by taking a more holistic approach to IT Portfolio Management, enabling rapid decision-making based on a company roadmap. This is driving companies to analyze and optimize their portfolio of business processes, technologies and applications - all of which are being stored and managed in one central knowledge repository. This repository approach provides tremendous value to the business. It enables consolidation of knowledge about all business and technical artifacts within the enterprise into a single source management system - laying the foundation for aligning IT with the business strategy. The compelling driver being maximizing the business value from your IT investments.
Why implement portfolio management?
In a recent Gartner study, Predicts 2005: IT Management reinvents itself, 40 percent of large IT organizations will take a disciplined, portfolio management approach to managing IT investments with the primary objective of improving strategic business alignment (1). Portfolio management is the first step in gaining control over IT projects to deliver value to the business. Portfolio management, tied to the company's strategic goals, allows both IT and business managers to better communicate and meet the company's overall corporate strategy.
What are the benefits?
Building a dynamic knowledge repository that is flexible, allows organizations to create a baseline of business and IT applications. At minimum, this will result in: . A Portfolio of all business and IT applications across the enterprise in a single source repository . A holistic view of the entire portfolio landscape and any redundancies . Improved communication between business and IT managers
SUBJECT Aligning your IT portfolio & business strategy Page 2 ONLINE http://www.casewise.com/products/ita-accelerator/ LEGAL © 2005 Casewise Ltd and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Casewise disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Casewise shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The reader assumes sole responsibility for the selection of these materials to achieve its intended result... [download for more]