Logical IT Inventory

IT plans that are based on poor information expose the enterprise to unacceptable and avoidable risk. The Logical IT Inventory in planningIT delivers a transparent and accurate window to the as-is landscape as well as future states of architecture as plans become approved. It is a single, structured and organized platform of enterprise architecture information describing the business/IT relationship in common semantics. It is the information source for all stakeholders involved in the planning process. Comprehensive data and their interrelationships are captured with sufficient detail to provide a baseline of information that supports any IT project / program planning task.

Information captured includes:

• Organizations and their hierarchical structures, including the roles, responsibilities and contact details of the employees
• Activities as process hierarchies, ranging from high level processes such as "accounting" to discrete processes such as "credit check"
• Applications and their versions which provide functionality (IT services) to end users, together with their assigned lifecycle states
• Information flows, which describe data flows between applications and the supporting software
• Business Objects and their versions, which are used in business processes and by applications (and transmitted in information flows) to describe "real" information such as customers, products and contracts
• Financials in user-defined cost types such as maintenance, hardware, license and human resource costs
• Infrastructure which is used to carry deployed applications and includes devices and their connections
• The geographic location of devices
• Catalogs of standards for IT services, components, business objects and technical platforms, with time sensitivities and policies.

The planningIT Logical IT Inventory includes features that automate workflows, streamline data collection and navigation processes, to encourage (or compel) widespread user communities to update content. Any member of the organization can access the system by clicking a web link, while simple screens and prompts facilitate error-proof data collection. planningIT actively monitors enterprise architecture data, runs plausibility tests during data maintenance. The system includes a powerful workflow engine that assigns stage-gate responsibilities, tracks and monitors performance and automatically escalates in case of bottlenecks or delays. An easy to use GUI supports power users and viewers as well as various roles.