A Project Portfolio Management governance process should start when a business user requests or suggests a new capability. The request is automatically routed to a gatekeeper, then to a business analyst or team for an initial business case before being routed to the operations council and the architecture standards committee for review and scoring.
The business team then evaluates the prioritized, ranked projects to determine the proper portfolio mix and whether to accept the recent request.
Project Portfolio Management is:
• A categorization model
• A common language for business and IT to …
• Support Business strategy
• Organize investments
• Evaluate and prioritize IT projects
• Govern and manage applications portfolio
• Decide when and how to make changes (opportunities)
• Understand what can and can not be changed
• Provide real-time visibility into resources, budgets, costs, programs,
projects, and overall IT demand
• A hedge
• “What if” scenarios enable us to analyze
the portfolio and assess the business
contribution of each proposal, project,
or application to the entire portfolio
• Triggers, Thresholds
The Enterprise Architecture steering committee should be part of this governance process and be able to measure the impact at various level of the architecture:
- What is in the impact in terms of Business Procee
- What is the impact at the information level
- What is the impact at the application level
- And finally what is the impact on the technology
Assuming that a company has an Enterprise Architecture in place and an associated governance, the PPM process should be linked to the first one.
None of the existing solutions related to PPM have considered yet this type of integration. On one side we do have PPM tools such as Mercury ITG (now HP), CA Clarity Niku and on the other side EA platforms such as Mega, Casewise, and Telelogic (Doors can be considered as some sort of Demand/Requirement Management solution but can not be considered as a PPM) among others.
I’m still wondering why a company such as HP has not yet been considering an EA tool integrated with their future PPM product, or even IBM which has a PPM product with rationale but no EA solution neither.
There is a high change that the next wave of acquisition after Service Management and SOA platforms will be Enterprise Architecture tools as this would make sense to deliver a full IT ERP.
Showing posts with label Mega. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mega. Show all posts
07 November, 2006
26 September, 2006
Configuration Management: How to really build a CMDB with an auto discovery tool
Service management projects that use a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) as central pointer to enterprise IT asset data should double in number over the next year; an independent research has concluded (Tertio Service Management Solutions). Configuration Management Database uptake is expected to double from 20% to 39% within a year, said the vendor behind the research. The reason for the increased popularity is down to a desire to adopt an ITIL based framework among 44% of respondents.
According to ITIL best practice recommendations, the CMDB should provide accurate information on the configuration of IT assets and their documentation in a way that will support all the other service management processes. For 70% of the organizations polled online during Tertio's research, the perceived benefits that results from implementation of a CMDB is expected to be an improved and coordinated picture of the application infrastructure, and the overall better management of IT assets.
Many companies who deployed Configuration Management have associated this process to the Asset/Inventory Management process/systems for the following reasons:
- Desktop Inventory is often based on inventory existing solutions
- Server Inventory is usually done with System Management solutions such as Tivoli, CA Unicenter, BMC Patrol, etc…
However, there is one activity missing from a Configuration Management view: the building of relationships based on Cis (configuration Items).
To be successful at Business Service Management, companies first should map applications and Services. This is probably the only way to know which IT failure is mucking up Business Services.
To address the issues with the Configuration Management process, companies should find a solution which would avoid creating manually the relationships between the various CIs (Configuration Items) which are identified with the various Inventory tools.
Companies need tools that collect systems configuration data, decode packets and watch kernel I/O to determine application dependencies. These are not service, performance or status monitors rather, they map all the servers, systems, applications, processes, services, users and sometimes even network devices to decipher what applications depend on, and what depends on them. This mapping also makes diagnostic, capacity and Service Management application delivery easier.
These tools should be able to:
- Improve the quality of data in a CMDB
- Be in real-time
- Populate data into the Service Desk
- Avoid to maintain manually the systems
- Keep in real time the relationship between CIs
- Improve all ITIL processes, but specifically Incident Management and Change Management
- Provide Change Impact Analysis features
- Track people changing the infrastructure into production
- Deliver Business Services views
- Map ITIL processes
- Integrate smoothly with both the Service Desk and the System Management solution
- Replicate these relationships into Business Service Management solutions
- Send alerts to the System Management console when for example a change on the Infrastructure is done in production
- Replicate these relationships with Enterprise Architecture platforms such as Mega, Troux technologies, Casewise, Popkin, etc..
- Provide out of the box connectors
- Cope with the long term strategy around Service Management and Enterprise Architecture
There used to be more that 10 to 15 vendors in that space, half of them have been acquired by companies such as Mercury, IBM, Symantec, BMC and others who integrated these tools into their Service Management products.
Companies haven’t yet considered implementing such solutions but this is slowly starting. Auto discovery tools are a must!
According to ITIL best practice recommendations, the CMDB should provide accurate information on the configuration of IT assets and their documentation in a way that will support all the other service management processes. For 70% of the organizations polled online during Tertio's research, the perceived benefits that results from implementation of a CMDB is expected to be an improved and coordinated picture of the application infrastructure, and the overall better management of IT assets.
Many companies who deployed Configuration Management have associated this process to the Asset/Inventory Management process/systems for the following reasons:
- Desktop Inventory is often based on inventory existing solutions
- Server Inventory is usually done with System Management solutions such as Tivoli, CA Unicenter, BMC Patrol, etc…
However, there is one activity missing from a Configuration Management view: the building of relationships based on Cis (configuration Items).
To be successful at Business Service Management, companies first should map applications and Services. This is probably the only way to know which IT failure is mucking up Business Services.
To address the issues with the Configuration Management process, companies should find a solution which would avoid creating manually the relationships between the various CIs (Configuration Items) which are identified with the various Inventory tools.
Companies need tools that collect systems configuration data, decode packets and watch kernel I/O to determine application dependencies. These are not service, performance or status monitors rather, they map all the servers, systems, applications, processes, services, users and sometimes even network devices to decipher what applications depend on, and what depends on them. This mapping also makes diagnostic, capacity and Service Management application delivery easier.
These tools should be able to:
- Improve the quality of data in a CMDB
- Be in real-time
- Populate data into the Service Desk
- Avoid to maintain manually the systems
- Keep in real time the relationship between CIs
- Improve all ITIL processes, but specifically Incident Management and Change Management
- Provide Change Impact Analysis features
- Track people changing the infrastructure into production
- Deliver Business Services views
- Map ITIL processes
- Integrate smoothly with both the Service Desk and the System Management solution
- Replicate these relationships into Business Service Management solutions
- Send alerts to the System Management console when for example a change on the Infrastructure is done in production
- Replicate these relationships with Enterprise Architecture platforms such as Mega, Troux technologies, Casewise, Popkin, etc..
- Provide out of the box connectors
- Cope with the long term strategy around Service Management and Enterprise Architecture
There used to be more that 10 to 15 vendors in that space, half of them have been acquired by companies such as Mercury, IBM, Symantec, BMC and others who integrated these tools into their Service Management products.
Companies haven’t yet considered implementing such solutions but this is slowly starting. Auto discovery tools are a must!
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