Strategic portfolio management

Key benefits

• Align IT portfolios to business strategy, required capabilities and requested demands
• Manage changes to IT portfolios in a consistent and transparent manner
• Expose dependencies and impacts between different IT portfolios–current and future
• Provide relevant stakeholders with a collaborative planning platform

Features

• Cross-portfolio analytics for a high-level view of how the various IT portfolios—application, project, technology, demand—interrelate
• Collaborative planning facilitated through road mapping, stakeholder-oriented views and reporting
• Process workflows to ensure alignment to policies and timelines to maintain governance and keep IT up-to-speed in the demand and portfolio processes
• Portfolio assessment according to any number of indicators to base portfolio decisions on the value, cost and risk across a number of possible IT investment alternatives
• Future-state planning and change management including on-demand generation of views of the IT landscape for any desired date or timeframe

Stakeholder support

• Use automated assistants and chatbots to help users find information efficiently and easily perform tasks such as creating and editing objects
• Let users explore and understand which aspects of the IT portfolio may need attention using modern AI technology for discovery and analysis
• Ease product adoption and usage in multinational environments by using machine translation engines to automatically translate user interface texts
   

Portfolio governance

• Create manageable portfolios that show clear responsibility for capturing information, for assessing portfolios, and for decision-making
• Implement standard business portfolios— for example, along business capability or organizational responsibility—and create ad-hoc portfolios as needed
• Use workflows and monitors to ensure that all required information is available and assessed before decisions are made and to make approval decisions transparent and auditable
   

Data capture and maintenance

• Use Alfabet’s integrations with other systems of record to maintain a complete, accurate and up-to-date repository
• Use templates, wizards, workflows and surveys to capture data, ensuring the IT landscape is documented with a consistent quality and categorized according to corporate conventions

Application portfolio management

Application inventory

• Capture the business, technology, information and functional perspectives as they relate to applications

Portfolio assessments 

• Analyze the application portfolio along multiple dimensions, such as cost, risk, usage, technology health and business fit
• Add new information attributes “on the fly” to perform ad-hoc application assessments
• Equip technology owners with application lifecycle reports to align their technology support plans and to understand application roadmap impacts

Demand management

Demand inventory

• Provide all IT stakeholders with a central inventory of the information required to assess demands and build an IT strategy

Demand assessments

• Associate demands to the strategies they support and the business capabilities they impact
• Ensure alignment of demands to business and IT goals using KPIs measuring issues such as value contribution, cost, and architectural impact
• Use portfolio diagrams and other analytical techniques to ensure that only the demands leading to the best business outcomes are approved

Impact analysis

• Document impacted capabilities, processes, applications, technologies and information objects during demand capture to be able to assess demand impact early in the approval process
• Consolidate demands by automatic identification of similar demands and thus reduce implementation effort and avoid conflicts during project execution
   

Technology portfolio management

Technology inventory

• Manage technologies from a central inventory supporting single and composite technologies as well as multiple taxonomies
• Understand the relationships between various IT-related elements, for example, technology usage by applications, supplying vendors and associated contracts

Portfolio assessments

• Combine and aggregate KPIs to create technology rankings
• Assess technology innovations, for example, the Internet of Things or artificial intelligence (AI), for their ability to improve business
• Perform impact assessments on the current landscape when planning transformation programs to detect conflicts and identify potential synergies

Project portfolio management

Project inventory

• Create a central project inventory and configure the program and project breakdown structure to fit your organization’s needs
• Understand the relationship of projects to strategies, demands, business capabilities, applications and technologies

Portfolio assessments

• Organize project portfolios along business structures, for example, organizations and business capabilities
• Create ad-hoc portfolios for specific, non-standard assessments
• Use portfolio scenarios to make tradeoffs transparent for decision-makers

Project planning

• Document how projects change applications and technologies, and perform impact analysis of projects on application and technology roadmaps
• Understand dependencies between projects and architecture to improve portfolio planning integrity