Resources
White papers
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Business IT Management
Business IT Management comprises a set of core capabilities to sustainably manage and ensure IT’s contribution to the business value. Essentially, Business IT Management aims at planning and monitoring the performance of IT support throughout its entire life-cycle – ensuring that business strategy and demands are completely understood, prioritized and executed on and that the costs, quality and risks to IT support are known and considered during decision-making. It is a facilitator to the team of planners, strategists, architects and portfolio managers in the CIO office enabling them to transform business wish into successful projects and reliable operations. The core capabilities of Business IT Management are:
- Business Relationship Management
- Enterprise Architecture Management
- IT Planning
- IT Financial Management
- IT Risk Management
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IT Planning That Works
No large company today would be able to compete without a strong Enterprise Resource Planning system that drives and integrates business processes, building and maintaining a high-quality information base for making business decisions. IT Planning requires the same approach: a centralized information base that is fed by integrated processes, updated with every plan made and every decision taken. This allows for accurate information to be provided to stakeholders at the time of decision-making.
This white paper demonstrates the importance of an IT planning framework that embraces process, information and collaboration in a synergistic triumvirate. The paper details fundamental information aspects and processes as well as stakeholder-specific views on the architecture.
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Effective IT Planning As a Weapon in Challenging Economic Conditions
Vulnerabilities in today’s economy coupled with the instability of the financial markets are causing havoc within the financial services industry. Market turmoil has prompted a massive amount of divestitures, downsizings, mergers and acquisitions, etc. Other industry sectors are also experiencing shake-ups and they are putting new emphasis on strategic planning, cost reduction and organizational restructuring to weather the storm and gain competitive advantage.
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Business Capability Management
Business capabilities prescribe a view of the enterprise based on business activities that are independent of specific business processes and organizational silos. Using capabilities the IT organization enters into a structured dialog with business based on a common language in order to identify which business activities are critical to enterprise success and which need improvement most urgently.
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Introducing Process to IT Planning
Most organizations will have a process set up for IT Planning. The question is how effective and efficient that planning process is. This will determine IT’s agility in supporting business change. Automated workflows are a way to anchor processes into the enterprise to ensure their efficacy. They also lead to more streamlined processes and deliver the ability to evaluate and measure the efficiency of processes.
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Planning IT from Demand to Budget
This paper argues that once transparency is achieved with a current IT baseline, the integration of portfolio and architecture management techniques in the planning process can deliver immediate investment savings and long term business benefits through standardization and flexibility. The whitepaper proposes a framework business case for an integrated planning system that eliminates costs for information retrieval and redundant IT investments; reduces costs for inefficient planning processes (40% savings with a transactional system) ; and reduces integration costs for non-standard architecture (30% of operation costs) in the long term.
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Logical IT Inventory
This paper argues that plans based on inaccurate information expose the enterprise to unacceptable and avoidable risk, and that a transparent and accurate window to the as-is landscape and to-be landscape is the essential starting point for every IT project and planning exercise. The whitepaper points out that while many ITOs invest as much as 15% of each IT project budget on an initial appraisal of the as-is landscape, transparency can be achieved far more efficiently with a sophisticated inventory system.
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Value of Enterprise Architecture
In building a case for EA, it is important to remember that an investigation into the financial issues and demonstration of a solid business case backing an EA initiative will increase chances for approval especially when competition for investments is high. Despite the perception on claims from industry experts that Enterprise Architecture cannot deliver a return on investment (ROI), the experiences of organizations running EA initiatives show that a direct return on investment within a period of one to three years is achieved. This paper examines the value proposition of EA and the specific ROI that planningIT can deliver.
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Planning for SOA Using Enterprise Architecture Management Best Practices
While some organizations continue to pursue SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) only in the context of consolidating routine technical administration tasks, many others comprehend that SOA bestows the opportunity for IT to strategically position itself as a business partner but are overwhelmed at the perceived necessity of rewiring their entire architecture; indeed some fail to see the role architecture plays in this at all. This paper argues how best practice enterprise architecture management including implementation of standards and governance processes are essential to plan and execute a successful transition to a service oriented architecture.
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Using Enterprise Architecture to Achieve Effective IT Cost Management
Most CIO’s know how much they spend on hardware, software and personnel but not what their costs are for application development and hosting, business process support or IT lifecycle costs, for example. Using enterprise architecture management best practices to obtain insight into IT/ business relationships, IT leaders can associate IT costs with the fundamental (architectural) elements of business processes, thus shedding light on where sink costs occur and also what architecture elements can be retired because they are no longer creating value.
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Finding Solutions to SOX Compliance in IT Architecture Planning
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 has led us down the unlikely path from corporate ethics to IT implementations – demonstrating how inextricably linked business and IT are. Though SOX’s major provisions don’t mention IT controls explicitly, SOX has had wide-reaching implications for the IT department. Even audit results don’t reflect the enormous effort spent on IT in order to render an enterprise SOX compliant. This whitepaper looks at how organizations can radically reduce the resources consumed in becoming SOX compliant by drawing from best practice architecture planning processes.
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Decision Support for Managing the Enterprise Architecture
As the IT architecture of an enterprise changes and develops, decisions need to be made that often have a significant impact on the future ability of the enterprise to execute its business. Decisions need to be based on comprehensive assessments that consider all of the relevant aspects of the issue at hand. Not only one-off evaluations but also on-going assessments are necessary as management mechanisms. By unveiling the strengths and weaknesses of the architecture, opportunities and threats for the enterprise can be identified. This paper examines three use cases of how the decision support tools provided by planningIT such as indicators, evaluation types, prioritization schemes and portfolios are used perform ongoing assessments and expedite decisions. and improvements instigated.
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Architecture Framework Support
Architecture frameworks have, over the years, provided a foundation for enterprise architects to deal with the increasing complexity of the IT environment and the growing sophistication of the requirements placed on the enterprise architecture team’s scope of responsibility. Whether a standard framework or proprietary, organizations look to them for a way to arrive at a structure for the architecture effort that makes it understandable so that it can be communicated and, in turn, become meaningful to the organization. This paper discusses the pros and cons for the most common standard frameworks in use today including TOGAF, COBIT, Zachmann, ITIL, DoDAF, FEA and IEEE Standard 1471 and explains planningIT’s positioning regarding these frameworks.
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IT Master Planning
The IT master plan is the key instrument used to translate business strategy into IT tactics. Without it, the IT organization’s capability to progress in line with the business strategy will be constrained, especially in a climate of accelerating environmental and organizational change. This paper examines how alfabet’s planningIT supports an IT organization to effectively filter IT strategy derived from the business strategy to an IT master plan, from which a detailed solution plan can be prepared for proposal approval.
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Integrative IT Planning
Situated at the intersection of business strategy and IT strategy, an IT planning system must be integrative because it effects changes throughout the IT landscape. An IT planning system is also responsible for conveying information on changes to other systems such as Program Portfolio Management and Enterprise Resource Planning solutions, which then process the information and relay any changes back to the IT planning system. The symbiotic relationships are what ensure unity and order in the IT domain. This paper takes a closer look at the systems planningIT integrates with and its interfaces to adjacent systems in greater the IT management process.
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