CA Clarity Integration Delivering Complete Cost, Resource and Change Visibility for IT Management CA has led the industry in providing integrated solutions. Enterprise IT Management (EITM) is CA s vision for enabling a new level of management control across the enterprise by integrating and automating the management of disparate applications. CA Clarity is the only Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) solution that enables organizations to integrate with leading IT service management, change management and asset portfolio management applications, ERP systems, and desktop schedulers. This new level of integration enables IT management to gain complete transparency of the costs incurred and resources utilized for all IT work throughout the organization. Benefits Offers complete transparency to the costs incurred and resources utilized for all IT work Integrates change management processes throughout the lifecycle, from initiation through closure Provides a holistic view of assets and related projects and resources Accelerates time-to-market for application development projects by utilizing best practice project and resource management Provides the means to consolidate disparate data sources to deliver one version of the truth Leverages existing IT investments by integrating with existing enterprise applications, including ERP, IT service and change management Eliminates manual and error-prone double entry of information Today s Challenge Today s IT organizations must run like a business by forecasting and delivering results with control and predictability, while aligning spend with business priorities. IT organizations must accomplish this while operating in accordance with today's stringent corporate governance requirements. Unfortunately, most IT organizations are faced with multiple systems of record for managing demand, time tracking, spend, changes, resources, project status, resource skills, assets, software code and expenses. Aggregation of this information is time consuming and fraught with potential for manual, error-prone double entry. Visibility is limited throughout the IT organization. The need for an integrated IT management solution is stronger than ever. New integrated portfolio dashboards need to include production performance figures, development progress metrics, quality criteria and application portfolio management data. The Solution CA Clarity offers an integrated, real-time portfolio management solution that enables organizations to manage their projects, applications, people and supporting assets. As part of CA s comprehensive EITM solution, CA Clarity provides an enterprise-wide view of all IT management information, well beyond the traditional project portfolio. This integration enables CA Clarity to display real-time executive dashboards for factbased decision making, thus providing better alignment between the IT organization and the lines of business it supports. CA Clarity delivers enhanced cost, resource, change and asset visibility essential for informed decisions regarding strategic priorities.
Deliver Integrated IT Management IT organizations require an integrated management solution to consolidate demand management, from incidents to strategic iniatives. While most project and portfolio management solutions offer integration with desktop schedulers and ERP systems, CA Clarity also integrates with strategic change, service and asset portfolio management applications offering a more robust integrated IT management solution. As a leader in enterprise change management, CA delivers customers an integrated IT management solution that includes CA Clarity, CA Harvest Change Manager, CA Unicenter Service Desk, CA Unicenter Service Catalog and CA Unicenter Asset Portfolio Management. By integrating project, resource, code, asset and configuration management, IT organizations can track and manage requests throughout the lifecycle with visibility for stakeholders. This integrated approach provides complete end-to-end governance for enterprise change management, which is a growing compliance requirement for today s organizations. Enable Cost and Resource Visibility IT organizations can benefit from total cost visibility from incident to resolution. CA Clarity provides this integration via Service Connect and CA Web Services Connectors. CA Clarity Service Connect integrates with leading service management applications, including BMC Remedy Help Desk. In addition, CA Clarity uses web services connectors to integrate with CA Unicenter Service Desk and CA Unicenter Service Catalog. Figure 1. CA Clarity delivers change request tracking and consolidated demand management from incidents to strategic initiatives. By integrating service management and CA Clarity, IT organizations can capture time, resource utilization and cost for all incidents. This integrated demand management approach allows IT to convert service desk incidents into approved change requests which can then be routed to CA Clarity. Tracking of these change requests within CA Clarity supports the IT organization s need to maintain Service Level Agreements (SLAs) around the delivery of projects. Once a change order is routed to CA Clarity it can be incorporated as a task in an existing or new project. A change dashboard can be created to show priority, percent completion, due date, resource assignment and cost. This allows for costing of help desk work and provides greater total resource utilization visibility from incident to resolution. Centralize IT Asset Portfolio Management CA Clarity provides better visibility into asset information to balance the project portfolio, enabling IT to make better project decisions and lower overall asset costs. IT asset portfolio management provides visibility of assets that are in production. Coupled with project and portfolio management, the IT organization has a holistic view of resource requirements across production and new resource requirements. CA Clarity uses web services connectors to import asset data and related projected costs from the CA Unicenter Asset Portfolio Management system. CA Clarity users can select from a full or incremental import of assets. A variety of filter criteria is available, including asset type, class, sub-class, status, active flag and cost type. CA Clarity then presents this high-level asset information in the IT Portfolio Manager module as an Asset Portfolio. Since many times project decisions can have a significant impact on the long-term cost of assets, CA Clarity enables IT management to optimize portfolios taking both projects and related assets into consideration.
Accelerate Application Development CA Clarity further supports IT management integration by accelerating application development through integration with CA Harvest Change Manager. After a change request or a strategic initiative creates a new project in CA Clarity for planning, analysis and scheduling, an associated package can be created in CA Harvest Change Manager to manage the development activities associated with that project. Throughout the development lifecycle, CA Clarity tracks the development process and provides updates on assignments, lifecycle stages, cost, and outstanding effort, via a comprehensive project management dashboard. If the application development effort was initiated through a change request, then the progress of the project is automatically updated in the service management dashboard. By leveraging CA Clarity, IT organizations can bring best-practice project and resource management to their application development efforts, as well as incorporate development activity into their resource capacity planning. Harness the Power of Desktop Schedulers CA Clarity Schedule Connect provides seamless bidirectional integration between CA Clarity and the two leading desktop project scheduling tools, Microsoft Project and Open Workbench, the open source alternative. Figure 2. CA Clarity integration provides a unified process for IT management. Although CA Clarity provides extensive project management functionality through its web interface, often project managers desire to harness the power of their desktop computers for detailed planning and scheduling. CA Clarity provides integration through a clientserver connection to either Open Workbench or Microsoft Project. This bidirectional integration allows users to simply check out a project from the repository, edit it locally, and then save it back without the need for time consuming file conversions. Changes made in CA Clarity and on the desktop are automatically synchronized, so users are always working with the most up-todate information. Furthermore, CA Clarity communicates via standard HTTP, instead of using transaction-heavy RPC protocols or JDBC connections. As a result, bandwidth is reduced, no additional firewall ports need to be opened and proxy servers and SSL are fully supported, allowing project managers to work on their plans across any network around the globe. Integrate with ERP via an XML Gateway An integrated IT management portfolio solution is not complete without harnessing the information found in enterprise ERP applications, such as SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft. IT organizations can integrate human resources, financial and expense data into CA Clarity for expanded portfolio planning and analysis. For example, human resources applications hold important information regarding resources and skill sets. This information can be synchronized to eliminate duplicate entry. Actual hours logged in CA Clarity time sheets can be sent to financial applications for project cost accounting to track capital versus expense costs for software development. Expense applications track the non-effort costs for projects. When integrated, this allows for complete visibility to all project costs for budgeting and tracking.
IT organizations can combine the power of CA Clarity with enterprise systems using XOG, the CA Clarity XML Open Gateway, a comprehensive set of published and open XML and Java-based APIs. XOG also supports Enterprise Application Integration products through infrastructure middleware. CA Clarity XOG preserves data integrity through the enforcement of business rules. Information exchange through integration APIs accesses the same business logic as when a user manually enters data to ensure consistency and reliability. CA Clarity XOG APIs adhere to open industry standards such as SOAP-enabled Web Services, JDBC, and JMS. Because the APIs are XML-based, even major system updates have minimal impact on the customer's integration. In addition, the APIs allow for both real-time and batch invocations to define when information is transferred. Figure 3. CA Clarity offers bidirectional integration with Open Workbench and Microsoft Project. Products CA s integrated IT Management products include: CA Clarity Project Portfolio Manager enables IT to prioritize investments and associated change-related activities according to business goals and objectives. The ability to establish sophisticated evaluation and selection criteria, create and optimize planning scenarios, communicate decisions, monitor progress and manage new ideas in a seamless, integrated system makes this solution an invaluable tool for the strategic management of organizational investments, resources and commitments. CA Clarity Service Connect includes a series of pre-built integration connectors to leading IT service management applications, including Unicenter Service Desk, and BMC Remedy Help Desk. CA Clarity Schedule Connect provides seamless bidirectional integration between CA Clarity and the two leading desktop project scheduling tools, Open Workbench and Microsoft Project. Open Workbench, the open source alternative to Microsoft Project, is available at www.openworkbench.org. CA Unicenter Service Desk manages virtually every aspect of an organization s operational change management requirements. With a powerful workflow engine, this advanced solution can automate and integrate complex change processes, including Request for Change (RFC) submission, change approval/ authorization, self-service change order submission and change impact assessment. Unicenter Service Desk is an enterprise level solution capable of meeting the most challenging change requirements. With the increasing adoption of best practices, this solution becomes the cornerstone for centralizing and coordinating change management processes, and includes integrated Incident and Problem management. CA Harvest Change Manager delivers a single enterprise-wide solution for tracking software changes and managing the application development process. Through simple point-and-click and dragand-drop operations, CA Harvest helps control changes to application documents and software, keep development schedules on track and make sure that team members and business users are always up-to-date with the latest status information. With this solution, developers can meet demanding delivery schedules in a timely fashion while maximizing productivity, reducing development costs and improving application quality.
CA Harvest Change Manager scales to handle projects of any size, from the largest client-server enterprise systems to smaller, mission-critical development projects. In addition, by integrating with CA Change Manager Enterprise Workbench and CA Endevor Change Manager, organizations can extend management to the mainframe for unparalleled software change and configuration management across the enterprise. CA Unicenter Asset Portfolio Management (Unicenter APM) reduces costs and increases efficiency by managing the lifecycle of assets from planning and requisitioning technology to retirement and disposal. CA Unicenter APM is a scalable, easy to use enterprise solution that manages IT assets and resources as they relate to vendors, contracts, and the financial impact on the organization. Figure 4. CA Clarity offers the XML Open Gateway for integration with ERP and other enterprise applications. For more information, visit ca.com/clarity or email Clarity@ca.com Copyright 2006 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document is for your informational purposes only. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document AS IS without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. In no event will CA be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document, including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised of such damages. MP308011006