Enterprise Portfolio Management

Transcription

1 Enterprise Portfolio Management Managing large volumes of structured data Through its powerful capabilities as a structural modeling tool, ABACUS Summary provides of whitepaper a ready-to-go Summary solution of whitepaper for EPM practitioners Summary of to measure, whitepaper: value, and prioritise investments across all Subject classes 1 of business and IT asset. Subject 3 Version 1.4 Published April 2014

2 Establishing a foundation for Governance EPM, together with Enterprise Architecture, BPM, IT Service Management, BI, and Strategic IT Planning, provide the foundation for business and IT Governance, Risk & Compliance Enterprise Portfolio Management (EPM) is one of the essential building blocks of IT Governance, through which the costs, alignment and life cycles of an organization s business and IT assets can be managed and future investments planned. Effectively bridging Enterprise Architecture with IT Service Management (ITSM), EPM provides input into business strategy development, and a perspective of the current values of all business and IT assets. Through establishing EPM practices, CIO s and enterprise architects can actively support evolving business initiatives while at the same time reducing inefficiencies, cutting costs and embedding agility across IT systems. ABACUS EPM in the context of wider IT Governance goals ABACUS is a powerful structural modeling platform that supports varied IT disciplines and initiatives in a flexible, centralised repository. ABACUS: Taking EPM from lists to analysis Through its powerful capabilities as a structural modeling tool, ABACUS provides a ready-to-go solution to enable EPM practitioners to measure, value, and prioritize investments across all classes of IT asset, including applications, hardware, infrastructure, data and information, together with projects and processes. This structured approach to managing business and IT assets also provides vital information into the Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) process, enabling determination of the optimal P a g e 2 A v o l u t i o n. A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d.

3 roadmap from the current enterprise architecture state to a planned future state. "What You Model Is What You Get " Portfolio Management APM diagrams in ABACUS can illustrate the application landscape : how individual applications interface and what processes and functions they support, as well as indicate any gaps of coverage. As either a part of an overall portfolio management activity, or through dedicated focus on individual asset classes, sub-portfolios can be modeled and managed in ABACUS according to their specific requirements. Application Portfolio Management (APM) is often the starting point in an organization s drive to optimize its IT investments, through which the assessment of applications in use can be undertaken and a determination made of their fitness for purpose. APM initiatives are often introduced to help consolidate disparate and uncontrolled applications that have been deployed over time in the many silos of an enterprise, in which duplicate functionality and products which no longer conform to corporate standards can be identified and eliminated, and significant cost savings realized through reduced maintenance expenditure. This structured, disciplined approach to managing a portfolio can provide valuable input into both IT modernization programs and into the alignment of these assets to the overall IT vision of the organization. Charts can indicate local versus attributed costs, Business fit versus Technical fit, trends in support costs, and roadmaps against milestones. Example Application Portfolio Management (APM) dashboard ABACUS supports the APM process by applying an analysis approach to the management of the portfolio. Lists and data from spreadsheets P a g e 3 A v o l u t i o n. A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d.

4 and other sources can easily be imported, to which attributes such as policies, principles and standards can be attached. Attributes link key information from across multiple portfolios, and a variety of charts and dashboards can be created to surface this information for key stakeholders. Such charts can include: business fit; how well each application is liked by IT and the business (incl. which should be retired, refreshed, re-designed or retained); and their support of corporate standards. Pre-configured Excel spreadsheet templates support management of various asset classes Through use of ABACUS s powerful Catalogue feature, in which a tabular heat-mapped view of data is provided, Excel spreadsheets can be round-tripped with ease, enabling the on-going maintenance of asset lists to be performed by external users. The ABACUS Portfolio Manager (formerly called Data Editor) tool can also be deployed inexpensively for this purpose. Example Catalogue in ABACUS with heat-mapping The visual representation of asset lifecycles is a common requirement of APM, as with any other asset class, and can be performed as an IT management discipline in itself. ABACUS supports Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM) through use of Gantt charts that can graphically depict lifecycles related to vendor roadmaps or standards criteria, for instance, reviewed against the organization's criteria and constraints. P a g e 4 A v o l u t i o n. A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d.

5 Capacity Planning, Prediction and Monitoring Standards-based Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM): Roadmap with milestones The management of assets within a disciplined, structured methodology can help ensure alignment of IT expenditure with overall business goals, and enable future technology decisions to match the organisation s strategic objectives. Example Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) dashboard Dashboards can be defined and deployed amongst users groups based on the viewpoint criteria of chosen frameworks, or specifically to match the needs of individual stakeholders. Furthermore, using ABACUS Simulator functionality, detailed metrics-based analysis can be undertaken against these roadmaps to decide upon an optimal roadmap for the future. Similar approaches can be used for the modeling of any other form of business or IT asset. The creation and flow of data and enterprise content can be modeled within an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategy, in which logical data views can indicate how and where data is created, where it is used, how it is stored, and when it is deleted. Information Usage KPIs: Cost, Footprint, Risk Example ILM Logical Data View P a g e 5 A v o l u t i o n. A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d.

6 Technical Standards Management (TSM) can also be performed in ABACUS, in which technical standards catalogues can be defined (or imported) for technologies, databases, platforms etc., which can then be modeled and road-mapped. Standards Lifecycle EPM, with all its derivative subportfolio s, can help maximise the value of IT assets while managing risks and costs. Approval Status Technology Standards Management and road-mapping in ABACUS Transitions from the current state to future states can also be planned in-line with evolving technological or corporate standards from which ABACUS can perform impact analysis to guide scenario planning. Numerous, pre-configured dashboards are provided out-of-the-box within ABACUS, based upon the wide range of supported frameworks and their application-specific viewpoints. Project Management Office (PMO) and Project Portfolio Management (PPM) dashboards provide visibility into projects and programs across an enterprise. Key facts and timelines can be graphically conveyed using various charting methods, including Gantt charts. Such dashboards can help program and project managers in core PPM activities of decision support, impact analysis and project design, and provide key information for communicating with wider stakeholder groups via ABACUS Publisher (as HTML files). P a g e 6 A v o l u t i o n. A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d.

7 Project KPIs: Cost, Impact, Risk... Project Portfolio Mgt: Gantt Chart with milestones Example Project Portfolio Management (PPM) dashboard ABACUS s support of pattern-based enterprise modeling can also enable design of future states from collections of best-practice industry and domain-specific patterns, and ultimately guide an organization's strategies through proven successes and experience. ABACUS: Where EPM meets EAM From lists to analysis: ABACUS supports the EPM process by applying an analysis approach to the management of the portfolio. With its completely flexible XML-based repository in which any type of entity can be modeled explicitly, ABACUS offers EPM practitioners options for portfolio management that significantly exceed those possible through use of spreadsheets and Visio diagrams alone. The inter-connection of every component into a rich, structural model based on a completely configurable meta-model built from one of over 100 standard industry frameworks and notations available out-of-thebox in ABACUS ensures that catalogues and diagrams are true representations of the central repository of data in ABACUS, rather than being just lists and pictures. This data fidelity enables new views of the business and IT landscape to be defined from any perspective, and for any changes to be automatically propagated across the model and throughout portfolios. As an Enterprise Architecture tool, ABACUS facilitates new and future state architectures evolutions to be planned and modeled, and for unique gap, what-if, and impact analysis techniques to be performed. P a g e 7 A v o l u t i o n. A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d.

8 ABACUS therefore provides a comprehensive solution for the portfolio management of projects, programs, applications, services and all forms of business and IT asset. Using pioneering (and patent-pending) techniques for Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), portfolio classification, pattern-based strategy, decision trees, options analysis and trade-off analysis, complete investment plans can be developed with ABACUS with quantitative confidence and certainty. ABACUS gives EPM practitioners the ability to: Get quick and easy insight into the structure of portfolios Slice & dice the IT estate from many (any) different perspectives not just according to a spreadsheet structure Make any changes to the model and re-run the portfolio analysis Explore cost reduction and other cost-related scenarios Communicate all of this to stakeholders through charts, Visio-like diagrams and 3D views All this from one single coherent model, with a collection of frameworks and elevators out-of-the-box! P a g e 8 A v o l u t i o n. A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d.

9 avolution Level 6, 90 Mount St, North Sydney NSW 2060 Australia Phone: +61 (0) Web: 2nd Floor, The Podium, 1 Eversholt Street London NW1 2DN United Kingdom Phone: +44 (0) sales@avolution.eu Web: Old Gallows Road, Suite 350 Vienna VA United States Phone: sales@avolutioncorp.com Web: