New planningIT 4.1 Release

alfabet is pleased to announce Release 4.1 of planningIT for architecture-driven strategic enterprise IT planning and management. This new release includes significant new features aimed at enhancing the user experience and supporting the IT organization in effective governance.

• Automated Data Quality Management ensures a reliable information base for decisions on architectural changes.
• The product’s powerful automated workflow capabilities, first introduced in Release 4.0, have been extended to include Interactive Workflow Diagrams and Escalation Management.
• A new project definition framework for the product’s Program Portfolio Management module allows enterprises to define their projects according to internal conventions.

Automated Data Quality Management

One of the biggest challenges in large, dispersed organizations today is ensuring the accuracy and completeness of information on the enterprise architecture – information so critically needed when considering architectural changes. Mature organizations have a centralized repository with many staff contributing to it – each with their own piece of the architecture puzzle. Inconsistencies and gaps are inevitable.

planningIT Release 4.1 provides Automated Data Quality Management for automated detection of data incongruence. The new capability allows enterprises to define sets of monitors to alert responsible users to data quality problems in their domain of control. Such rule-based monitors could expose, for example, the following:

• A strategy that has not been acted upon
• An incompletely documented information flow in which business data is not associated with an application on the input side or the output side or both
• Breached governance rules such as an object that has not been assigned a mandated deputy
• A critical application that requires high availability, yet is being fed by an application that has considerably lower availability
• a compliance requirement that is not being met

Upon detection of discordance, notifications or assignments are sent automatically to the person defined in the rule. Planers and strategists can be confident that up-to-date, reliable information is at hand on which to base their decisions.

Workflow Enhancements in planningIT Release 4.1

Automated workflows improve IT governance, compliance, efficiency and – importantly - collaboration in IT planning and management. planningIT Release 4.0 introduced automated workflows to support enterprises in configuring complex standard workflows. planningIT Release 4.1 extends on existing workflow capabilities to improve usability and flexibility in designing and executing workflows. alfabet has introduced workflow diagrams to visualize workflow definitions in easily understood representations. Classic workflow diagram elements clearly depict the actions, decision points and players involved in a workflow. Conditions and other parameters can be included in a workflow diagram. Diagrams are directly related to their respective template descriptions so that a change in either is reflected in both forms of representation.

The new release also includes Escalation Management for workflows, which enables users to define what the next step upon expiration of workflow activity that hasn’t been fulfilled. Users can stipulate, for example, that the workflow activity is routed to another person or that a compensating activity is initiated.

Revised Program Portfolio Management in planningIT Release 4.1

planningIT’s project management framework in the product’s Program Portfolio Management module has undergone significant new development in Release 4.1 in answer to customer needs for an individually definable project framework. In providing a generic definition of project hierarchies, the new release offers more flexibility in terminology, depth and process when managing the project portfolio. Users are free to define the project hierarchy (e.g. program, project, subproject) according to company conventions, using any amount of levels and company-specific terminology. Users can associate the project management activity – for example, budgeting, solution architecture planning, cost accrual planning or monitoring – at any level, or at several levels.

Release 4.1 also offers better support for prioritizing projects and planning investments by showing how project budgets are allocated over years. This enables decision-makers to understand the budgetary viability of a project over a period of time. When project budgets are regarded over a time horizon, enterprises have the flexibility in, for example, postponing a certain project for a year or two when more budget for that particular strategic program becomes available. With this new functionality, planners can also see budget overruns on a per annum basis.

For notes on previous releases visit release archive.