12 September, 2006

To select today an integrated IT Governance platform is a major challenge…

Once a company has decided to design its governance framework, it is usually looking for a platform to support the underlying processes.

Service Management is usually supported by Service Desk solutions such as Peregrine, Remedy, CA and many others ITSM suites. PPM is usually supported by companies which started with project management solutions and extended the capabilities to Portfolio Management such as Primavera, PlanView, Prosight, etc.. Some companies also have time sheet solutions based or not on Microsoft Project. Demand Management solutions have been until now isolated from PPM and usually are also standalone solutions such as IBM RequisitePro, Mercury and Telerate DOORS. Enterprise Solutions can be found from various vendors such as Mega, Troux technologies, Telerate and others.

We can observe trend where solutions start to become integrated through the M&A wave. CA bought Niku, HP acquired both Peregrine and Mercury, but still. many companies have best of breed solutions which are not integrated and do not provide integrated views on the health of an IT department.

CIOs and other Managers would like to see integrated dashboards to find out where issues are and what actions have been taken on.

Two things need to be considered for the time being:

- to develop in house solutions to retrieve information coming from these various solutions in order to have a single coherent and consistent view of the IT department and deliver the expected visibility to the business users
- to exchange information between these solutions:
o Demand management probably linked to Change Management
o Enterprise Architecture linked to PPM
o PPM linked to Time Management
o Change Management linked to Release Management solutions (e.g. desktop, business solutions such as ERP, CRM)
o Enterprise Architecture linked to Change Management

And probably much other integration…

Everything would be based on the pillars of the company’s IT Governance framework. As an example…how would a company using Six Sigma or CMMi, integrate with a Service Management solution?

May be in 3 to 5 years time…vendors will understand that we need integrated solutions and acquire the missing modules for a full IT Governance solution. Today, best of breed remains the only possibility…

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A suggested correction... ProSight was never a project management tool company. It started out as a pure play portfolio management solution of which projects is one type of many types of investment domains it can manage. We created the space of portfolio management and when Meta covered it we were ranked in the top slot. Yes we have customers who use ProSight Portfolios for PPM, but a majority use it for other investment portfolios including the applications in the data center, new product ideas, marketing programs, capital assets (such as facilities), defense capabilities, etc. Instead of providing rear-view mirror roll up reports, ProSight Portfolios started out as a top-down proactive planning solution that would span a wide variety of systems and data sources. Almost half of the US government's IT spend is prioritized and submitted to the OMB with ProSight.

-Mark Lawler
CTO and patent holder

Serge Thorn said...

Thanks Mark for the clarification.

Best Regards

Serge