|
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
- Maximized value of IT investments while minimizing the risk
- Reduced training time for new staff
- Allow for more efficient schedule and maintenance of resources
- Faster project start-up
- Provide information & support to projects
- Establish processes and control mechanisms
One of the most compelling reasons to engage in a Portfolio Management initiative is to closer align the business strategy with the currently invested technologies. Having a clear view of all IT applications across the enterprise can be quite beneficial. Scottish Power, for example, created a knowledge repository for the enterprise with the goal of "helping the business get more out of their investment in technology, by establishing control and visibility over the applications estate" Indicated Doug Smith, a Design Authority at Scottish Power. Other reasons why organizations decide to develop a knowledge repository include better support for projects in general. Having a knowledge repository can better support projects such as Change Management; Merger and Acquisition planning; Migration Activities; Retention of Knowledge, Consolidation of Applications and can provide a migration plan to support the introduction of new applications and business functionality within an organization.
There are a few areas to take into consideration when thinking about aligning IT portfolio to the business strategy. For example, it is vital to understand how the business operates. This means capturing and understanding the underlying processes across the enterprise. Some call this the 'as-is' state whereby a repository is created with business and IT artifacts. By designing a blueprint or visual model of the artifacts, then creating the associations between applications, processes, locations, data, organizations, and technologies, business managers can begin to understand what their portfolio looks like and the processes they support (or don't support). Creating this type of view of the organization can immediately provide ROI to management in the form of better decision-making abilities by understanding the impact of proposed change.
Process model supported by Applications and Technologies
Another area of consideration when aligning the IT portfolio with the business strategy is generating a roadmap. Now that the repository is populated with business and technical artifacts, the next stage is a roadmap.
|
