Resources
Business-IT Management - Meet Business Expectations for IT
Business Relationship Management
Business Relationship Management promotes communication between business and IT ensuring that: IT knows business strategy; business understands the value of IT strategy; and business expectations on IT service delivery are managed.
Crucial to this is demand management to ensure that any business demand for IT services is documented and transparent to all stakeholders – providing them with up-to-date information on demand status and their responsibilities in fulfilling demand. Demand approval processes are critical to providing good governance of investment decisions.
Underlining this is capability management which provides the common semantics needed for Business/IT communication. The map of the core business capabilities provides a stable platform for mapping IT support to business needs. Business can then evaluate the current IT support for each capability and strategize on which type of support is appropriate, e.g. is the priority low cost or high agility? Such evaluations and strategizing delivers a heat-map to focus IT activity.
To ensure the right demands are implemented business and IT have to go through a process of business strategy validation, in which business strategy is documented and broken down into operative goals which are then associated with demands, running and planned programs, and current architecture. This enables analysis and alignment of current and future IT activity to business strategy and understanding of impacts of changes to programs on business strategy.
Synchronization of business and IT activity is facilitated with IT road-mapping capabilities which give transparency over IT plans and activities from multiple dimensions – IT support roadmaps for processes, organizations, capabilities, etc. These roadmaps support impact analysis and plan changes while strategic roadmaps act as scenarios for discussing the IT strategy and – once chosen – for ensuring compliance of tactical roadmaps to business strategy.
Effective communication between business and IT ensures that:
- IT knows business strategy
- Business understands the value of IT strategy
- Business expectations on IT service delivery are managed
Enterprise Architecture Management
Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) provides the IT organization with the tools for assessing and improving the performance of the IT landscape in terms of support for business, costs, risks, agility and future viability. It supports impact analysis for any planned changes and enforces technology strategy by creating and monitoring architecture principles and standards. EAM ensures IT and Business Management understand how the IT landscape is performing.
As running applications usually constitutes the lion’s share of IT spending, application portfolio governance is crucial to containing costs while ensuring IT support to business is not impacted. Information on the organization’s application landscape needs to be captured and maintained – including how the application supports business. Furthermore, to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the application landscape, KPIs such as cost, failure rates and risk are captured to provide the business intelligence needed to optimize the application portfolio.
Similarly, large and uncontrolled technology portfolios cause complexity and increased costs for maintaining know-how and the helpdesk. Technology portfolio governance overcomes this by providing a catalog of technologies that are in use or that are planned to be used and which communicates technology standards. Processes ensure standards are adhered to and that new technologies are evaluated properly before productive use. It also reduces the number of technology combinations to be supported – lowering risks and costs.
Finally, information portfolio governance enables organizations to understand who owns and uses data and where this data is being processed. This provides valuable input into possible application or database consolidation scenarios. Furthermore, it supports compliance with data protection regulations by providing a framework for classification of information and by defining clear business responsibility for information.
IT Planning
IT Planning has the goal of merging the understanding of demand from the Business Relationship Management with the understanding of strengths and weaknesses in the IT landscape from Enterprise Architecture to produce an approved set of projects and roadmaps – IT plans. To achieve results IT Planning has to be collaborative and process-oriented to be able to coordinate the disparate stakeholders involved and ensure quality stage gates are defined and adhered to.
An indispensible stage in IT Planning is target architecture design. This is the thorough analysis of business demand in order to understand its impact on the as-is architecture – and with it the impact on the company – and to design the target IT support to fulfill that demand along with corresponding migration plans. Scenario management ensures that the optimal IT solution for attaining the target architecture is selected in a transparent process following governance guidelines. This enables companies to compare alternatives for implementing the target architecture, e.g. different vendor solutions and make or buy decisions. It involves comparing business plans, involved changes to the IT landscape, skill requirements and time-lines in order to select the optimal solution in a way transparent for all stakeholders.
To create a sound basis for the roadmaps, project and release management breaks down the delivery of IT support into packages that form part of programs, projects and productive releases. By doing this at an early stage, possible project and release conflicts are avoided. Finally, a project portfolio management process supports the selection of the optimal portfolio of projects to be executed considering the available budget. This is facilitated by defining portfolios, budgets and critical KPIs for assessing the alignment of projects to business and technology strategy. Once approved, the portfolio is then used to monitor project implementation.
Finally, a project portfolio management process supports the selection of the optimal portfolio of projects to be executed considering the available budget. This is facilitated by defining portfolios, budgets and critical KPIs for assessing the alignment of projects to business and technology strategy. Once approved, the portfolio is then used to monitor project implementation.
