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Integrative IT Planning - Deriving synergies from complex IT environments for effective IT planning
INTRODUCTION
IT Management involves many disciplines
As IT has grown to become the technological underpinning of today’s business, so has the number of processes for managing its various aspects. Disciplines such as Enterprise Architecture Management, Business Process Management, Product Portfolio Management, Change Configuration Management, Enterprise Resource Planning and IT Planning have evolved to define the purpose, scope and tasks of individual work groups. Good software products have been developed to support each of these areas with information reservoirs, automated workflows and guidelines for governance. They contribute greatly towards process efficiency and effectiveness, and IT staff depends on them to run a smooth ship. Working like a team of experts, each ‘specialist’ system is focussed on its own domain while collaborating with other systems to hand off and receive required information. Standards have done much to promote this interdependence, bringing greater synergy into the IT complex and greater value to the user.
Only an integrated IT environment can help maximize the benefits of automation. Consider the following advantages:
- Re-use of existing information
- Minimal redundant data entry
- Complete and current data
- Reliable information base
- Enforcement of procedures, policies and naming conventions
- Interactive applications
IT Planning – an integrative discipline
For the process of IT Planning to be effective, it must in itself be integrative, holding information on and defining and maintaining relations between all of the relevant planning elements: demands, project proposals, architectural designs, hardware, software, workflows, human resources, corporate policies, business strategies and cost information.
Much of this information is maintained by other sources so that any system supporting the IT planning process must be well integrated with the planning system in order for planning to be accurate. The planning system must know the physical and logical states of the artefacts - including their evolution over time - and this for each aspect or layer of the IT planning:
- for the business layer:
organizational structure, business processes, business functions and business data - for the technical layer:
applications, standard software products, release information and operational information - for the information layer:
costs and planned investments
Because it effects changes in 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.
planningIT – The Linchpin for Business & IT Alignment
Situated at the intersection of business strategy and IT strategy, planningIT plays a central role in the IT Management process, helping to determine how business processes can be modelled, which projects to embark upon, which IT investments should be made, and how costs can be reduced. It presides over a multitude of interfaces to adjacent systems to ensure a complete and accurate information basis. Change information from other IT Management systems is reliably propagated through to every occurrence of an artefact.
planningIT supports all standard and commonly used IT Management products in the areas designated in the following diagram.
Data Interchange – Methods and Quality Assurance
planningIT supports import and export capabilities based on XML / xsl-xslt standards, which allows data to be exchanged with any tool supporting those standards.
A central issue for data interchange is how it is performed for metamodels. Several of the solutions surrounding planningIT, as well as planningIT itself, use meta-modelling to define the relationships between system elements. These various meta-modeling tools define classes in different ways. For classes that have no equivalent in planningIT, new equivalent classes can be easily defined in the planningIT meta-model and the data imported into this structure. Otherwise, planningIT provides mapping and binding logic. Such out of the box import capabilities will automatically adjust to metamodel attribute extensions performed synchronically at the source and in planningIT.
As the integrity and consistency of data is of utmost importance in planningIT, quality checks are performed by planningIT during imports to ensure that inconsistencies and contradictions of data from the originating tool are not taken over. It is often the case that the originating data source permits data discrepancies due to lack of adherence to established modeling conventions. planningIT compensates for this by enforcing correct input on its own. For example, if a class has start and end date attributes, planningIT requires that the end date is later than the start date, which may not be the case for the application from which such data is imported.
TEAMWORK IN IT MANAGEMENT
Business Change Propagation in planningIT
Companies have made substantial investments in Business Process Modelling (BPM) tools over the years. As they move forward in the direction of architecture-based, integrated IT planning, cooperation between BPM and IT planning systems is essential to ensure the protection of BPM investments and to guarantee the integrity of the collaborative planning process. Taking on the role of ‘project manager’ for the adjacent BPM solution, planningIT assumes the overall responsibility for driving change into the architecture description and planning. As new models are committed into the BPM system and the artefacts (business processes, organizations, applications, interfaces, etc.) are exported to planningIT, propagation mechanisms in planningIT reliably update every relationship aspect defined in the new model.
planningIT also maintains an overview as to the level of implementation of the new business process. planningIT can work with BPM products such as Casewise and ARIS in a read-only modus or bidirectionally to allow changes to be made to business process descriptions and definitions on either side.
