planningIT - Logical IT Inventory

A Transparent IT Landscape

IT planning takes place in a rapidly changing business environment and involves an overwhelming volume of volatile data – hundreds of applications and many thousands of artefacts in multiple locations. Complex interdependencies between distributed specialists, critical business processes, IT support services and the underlying technical infrastructure can be significantly disrupted by isolated actions and incidents. In this context, the essential ingredient for effective IT planning is transparency.

Many organizations struggle to document the IT landscape with isolated Office tools. Isolated subject matter experts own fragments of technical information, while organizational and functional information is typically maintained in ad hoc silos. Where available, inhouse databases are used which lack the GUI and visualization tools needed to show relationships between data classes (business, technical and financial information).
These in-house, standalone solutions are impossible to consolidate and unable to automatically generate useful reports.

IT plans based on inaccurate information expose the enterprise to unacceptable and avoidable risk. A transparent and accurate window to the as-is architecture is the essential starting point for every IT project and planning exercise. While many organizations invest as much as 15% of every IT project budget on an initial appraisal of the as-is landscape, transparency can be achieved far more efficiently with a sophisticated inventory system.

An efficient inventory system must:

• Capture all aspects of the enterprise architecture including people, business processes and technical elements and costs
• Document information with sufficient detail to align every IT investment with a business objective
• Enable user-defined queries
• Export reports to the Office environment
• Streamline data collection for continual updates
• Easily configure “create”, “read-only” and “data entry” rights to protect data integrity
• Disseminate information to a broad community of stakeholders in multiple locations via the web.

The Solution: alfabet’s Logical IT Inventory

alfabet’s Logical IT Inventory delivers the transparency needed to plan IT from demand to budget. Comprehensive information about the as-is landscape is captured with sufficient detail to provide a baseline of information that supports any IT project or planning task.

alfabet’s Logical IT Inventory captures:

• Organizations and their hierarchical structures, and 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

An End-to-End View of the As-Is Environment

Any entity in alfabet’s Logical IT Inventory can be related to any other entity in an end-to-end view of the as-is environment. Evaluation schemes for any object class can be defined and any entity can be assessed using indicators. Popular examples include business criticality, risk, business impact, standards compliance.

Key relations include those between:

Business Layer and Application Layer

• Which organization uses which application for which process?
• Which IT business services are provided by each application and its re-usable components?
• What are the operating expenses per application and IT service?
• What are the business properties of an application, in terms of the services they provide, the information they process and the connecting flows?
• Which organizations are responsible for which applications and projects?

Application Layer and Physical Layer

• What is the standard technical platform for an application and which components are used?
• Where are applications and re-usable components deployed?
• Which devices support specific applications and re-usable components?
• Where are devices located?
• How are devices connected with each other?

The supported relationships deliver an end-to-end view of the IT landscape as the basis for planning IT from demand to budget.

Continuous data collection and information retrieval

alfabet’s Logical IT Inventory includes features that 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.

The system also assigns update responsibilities to named individuals. An easy-to-use GUI supports power users and occasional visitors:

• Data-centric, hierarchical navigation of inventory content using explorers
• Role-specific explorers help users to find what they need, when they need it (with hyperlinks to drill down for more detail),
• Browsers that hide detailed technical information from nontechnical viewers
• Simple and advanced search facilities to retrieve objects
• Automatically generated and user-defined reports for any object in the inventory (applications, components, platforms, processes, organizations…)
• On-line help with a comprehensive glossary of terms

Collaborative work and the office environment

The Logical IT Inventory supports several hundred users and information is always available to approved audiences via the intranet. Changes can only be made by power users with assigned create and edit rights, which can be specified for any element. Collaborative work features include automatic notification of parametric changes, email transfer of bookmarks and a recorded change history for each object.

alfabet’s Logical IT Inventory seamlessly interfaces to the Office environment

• Export Windows client reports in HTML, Excel, PowerPoint and MS Project
• Export web client reports in html and emf and convert to gif and jpeg files
• Upload and download any documents
• Create and save links as URLs
• Automatically (and repeatedly) import data from MS Project and LDAP.
• External applications can read and write data in alfabet’s Logical IT Inventory via a Web Services API.

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