Transforming IT Project
Portfolio Management
Through Cloud Integration
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ot only are CIOs and their IT organizations asked to juggle more projects in the current business climate, they are also expected to provide their executive management with real time reporting on spending, resource allocation, and the business impact of IT initiatives. In response, many IT leaders need to expand their horizon beyond their IT organization and pull in data from various other departments to gain a more comprehensive perspective on the impact of IT initiatives on business strategy and results.After using Project Portfolio Management (PPM) tools to help manage the delivery of various IT projects and applications, progressive IT organizations are extending the power of PPM tools through cloud-based integration solutions to connect these applications with various business systems and provide greater visibility across the entire organization. In the recent Forrester report titled,
“What’s Ahead for PPM? Open yet Integrated Is the Name of the Game,”
analyst Margo Visitacion pointed out that IT governance is quickly graduating from date-driven task management to adding visibility, planning, and decision making support.
“Regardless of an organization’s
maturity, PPM should not and
cannot be a standalone tool.”
How Progressive IT Organizations Are Facilitating
Improvements and Innovations from IT Governance
through Integration
WHITE PAPER
This white paper highlights industry trends, best practices, and real-world examples of how companies are using cloud-based integration platforms such as the Innotas Integration Platform to extend the reach of their IT Governance and PPM solution, while delivering greater visibility and transparency across IT projects, resources, and requests.
- Margo Visitacion
in “What’s Ahead for PPM? Open yet Integrated Is the Name of the Game”
“Regardless of an organization’s maturity, PPM should not and cannot be a
standalone tool,” the Forrester report stated. “PPM’s real value is its ability to combine and analyze disparate data, enabling project and development organizations to better monitor and control planning and execution; with the capacity to create more accurate data for planning and reporting.”
As analysts have reported, PPM systems have proven to be an excellent source for core planning data for applications, projects, resources, and spend. However, IT teams that are getting more involved in driving and supporting business strategy and innovation are quickly realizing that to provide real intelligence and visibility, PPM systems need to be integrated into areas such as finance and human resources.
Fortunately, the emergence of cloud-based PPM and integration solutions are providing IT leaders with flexible, fast, and inexpensive platforms to connect business systems, analyze data, and share it across the entire organization, not just IT. With the introduction of pre-defined, standard integration connectors and business logic, companies now have plug and play capabilities to easily connect systems in IT, finance, HR and help desk within a much shorter timeframe.
Connecting Projects and
Reporting in the Cloud
Many enterprises are turning to cloud services to help manage their applications and business processes because of
lower costs and faster time to value. As companies have become more comfortable with moving applications from on-premise data centers to the cloud, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has emerged as a common strategy. Cloud-computing platforms, such as Force.com, have provided choices for convenient delivery of applications and reduced capital expenditures from pay-as-you-go capacity. As an example, supporting the AppExchangeTM, Salesforce’s “cloud-computing
marketplace,” the Force.comTM platform provides direct access to more than 1,300 different applications.
But as more data and applications are moved to the cloud, integrating them and mining that data is becoming a major consideration and challenge for IT. Because cloud applications have to fit into an existing environment that incorporates different data sources, many IT organizations have struggled to align and connect IT and business goals.
A typical example is where companies now need to integrate IT projects and work requests with HR and then ultimately analyze the actual approved hours within an ERP or financial system. Enter integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS), an emerging cloud service that addresses on-premise and cloud integration and IT governance needs.
As IT organizations have become more sophisticated at measuring and managing their projects with the help of IT governance and PPM solutions, they are looking for better alternatives to manage the integration of enterprise data for analysis and decision making, such as connecting service management and resource demand systems.
Traditionally, integrations have been time consuming, costly, and complicated. They had to be built one by one using complex custom code and expensive middleware, along with additional hardware in some cases. Often, they relied on using APIs and
point-to-point coding to patch together different applications.
But enterprises are now finding they need a less complicated integration strategy, supported by a flexible and secure integration platform in order to successfully manage the overall IT project portfolio more efficiently. So, unlike the costly enterprise-level integration platforms that used to be the only options available, more affordable, cloud-based alternatives are now rapidly emerging. The classic application integration
challenges of data consistency, automating multi-step processes, and implementing compositions must still be dealt with, even if some or all of an organization’s applications are in the cloud. By utilizing integration platform capabilities provided in the form of cloud services, IT can address traditional and new integration challenges.
According to Gartner, even enterprises that might initially doubt the value of iPaaS can’t ignore this new approach because over the next five years, many iPaaS capabilities will be incorporated into different SaaS offerings. They will also be utilized by integration brokerage, cloud services brokerage, and other IT service providers as enablers of their offerings. In fact, Gartner is predicting that by 2016, at least 35% of all large and mid-sized organizations worldwide will be using at least one type of iPaaS offering.
In a recent report titled “Integration Platform as a Service: Moving Integration to the Cloud, ” Gartner analysts Massimo Pezzini and Benoit J. Lheureux wrote: “In the short term (through 2013), leading-edge user organizations, looking for greater flexibility, faster time to market, support for new cloud-centric business models and cost reduction, should look at iPaaS approaches as potential alternatives to traditional (that is, non-cloud-based) integration and governance platforms for an ample set of requirements.’’
The Evolution of IT Project
Portfolio Management
For the last two decades, organizations were focused on specific, isolated work in the traditional project management model. But the project management marketplace is moving from an early stage adoption model to a more defined and mature methodology with a variety of approaches that require a diversity of roles and tools.
In fact, by 2014, organizations will invest 30% less time and money in traditional IT project management than they did in 2010, according to Gartner. “Linear, phase-by-phase project management will decline in use in favor of faster, more iterative, and “lighter” approaches that are results — not process — driven,’’ according to a November 15, 2010 Gartner report titled “Predicts 2011:
PPM Goes From Managing Projects to Managing Value and Change”.
“Making this shift is essential for organizations, individuals, service
providers, and others who have invested heavily in the current paradigm of structured project management for both business and personal success because the recipe is changing,” according to
the report.
Traditional project management means being able to manage work by setting a specific beginning, an end, and concrete deliverables. But unforeseen issues such as changes in requirements, scope, timing, and budget can derail and have long derailed well-run projects, the report notes. “The current and future business environment will require dealing with high levels of ongoing uncertainty and change needs to be expected, not eschewed. The velocity of change continues to rapidly increase and linear project and program management techniques, quite simply, can’t keep pace.”
“By 2014, organizations will
invest 30% less time and
money in traditional IT project
management.”
- Source: Gartner Research Report: Integration Platform as a Service:
Moving Integration to the Cloud; March 7, 2011
disparate resources, heterogeneous applications, and third party partners to create one logical system instead of component architectures. Whether you need to tie together information from different parts of your ERP, HR, resource management, help desk, or portfolio management systems, the Innotas Integration Platform gives CIOs and IT managers better visibility into all of their working applications so they can improve their decision making across the entire enterprise.
“A standalone PPM system is good at reporting the data it captures, but, as part of the decision-making process, there is always data that will live outside [disparate] systems that may not be easily accessible,” says Tim Madewell, Senior VP of Services at Innotas. “A comprehensive integration strategy is critical to
governance, providing executives and decision makers a clear view into your work, resources, and budgets to make better decisions.”
Additionally, data from asset manage-ment systems, financial systems, and HR systems, for example, sometimes needs to be manually duplicated, and errors can occur during that process, he notes. “If I pull data from the source of truth instead of massaging it from a spreadsheet, there’s a quality, timeliness, and comprehensive breadth of visibility I will get. Presenting that information in an integrated way gives me an executive-level view to make better decisions.”
Connecting PPM and APM
Applications via the Cloud
With the continual trend toward tighter budgets and the need for faster implementation, the integration of critical business systems in a cloud model is viewed as a way to significantly save on IT costs. A cloud-based integration platform provides reduced development effort and complexity with no need for expensive middleware, custom coding, or other integration tools.Based on requests from customers to integrate various applications such as workforce, service desk, and application lifecycle management tools into their cloud-based IT Governance and PPM solutions, Innotas recently introduced a cloud-based integration platform. The platform provides a simplified, cost-effective way to integrate and manage
In order to bring together the true power of PPM with integration platforms, Forrester’s “What’s Ahead for PPM” report recommends that companies should focus on the following four key areas of integration:
•
Integration with labor information to show internal resource capacity.•
Integration with financial systems to support budget and project accounting.•
Integration with Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools to enable realistic baseline schedule tracking.•
Integration with service management tools for improved visibility into resource demand.Case In Point: Integrating IT
with Business Systems
As organizations become more sophisticated in their approach to IT governance and project management, there is a growing need to integrate IT management systems with other business systems. By adding predefined integration templates, companies are now effectively connecting reporting and visibility to HR, finance, and help desk.
Consider the example of a large retailer, which had a growing challenge of managing its IT departments’ inbound demand for support and new projects. The company adopted an IT governance system, which helped to automate and track processes such as ticketing, help desk calls, incident management, and inquiries submitted via the customer portal.
Once the company had an IT governance system in place to track demand, the next step was integrating that information into workflow systems so the company could escalate incidents into formal work requests to more efficiently manage staff time and resources. By integrating its project management to the help desk, the company was able to pass tickets and changes into the PPM system for greater prioritization, and also track time and resources more effectively.
“PPM tools must cross
organizations to bring managers
the visibility they need.”
- Margo Visitacion
in “What’s Ahead for PPM? Open yet Integrated Is the Name of the Game”
As a next step, the company needed to integrate non-confidential resource information on project status and skills tracking into an HR system and ideally accomplish that without entering the data into two places.
Finally, the retailer was looking to connect that data on resource allocation to its proprietary system. Using an integrated Platform-as-a-Service model, the company was able to quickly and affordably flow the actual approved hours reports for various IT projects through to its financial system for cost accounting.
Conclusion
The emergence of cloud computing platforms has enabled fast and flexible delivery of all kinds of applications. However, many companies have realized the rush to deploy a wide range of applications has resulted in a disjointed project-focused approach within IT departments.
Progressive companies are now moving to closely align their IT initiatives to business strategy and are subsequently realizing that IT governance and integration are keys to accessing relevant data and better collaboration with the communities they serve. In order for IT organizations to have a strategic focus on the business, they need to have an integrated approach that automates their own resource management, while seamlessly sharing that intelligence with other departments, such as finance and HR. “It’s no longer good enough to have the best product on the market if it doesn’t complement and integrate with other applications in the enterprise, and we believe that people, product, and platform make up the three pillars of a successful offering. Innotas’ cloud integration solution and strategy is an exciting addition to our
go-to-market strategy,” says Kevin Kern, Innotas CEO.
Cloud computing has brought tremendous benefits and efficiencies, and it has increased the need for integration to finance, HR, and help desk applications. In fact, as the number of hosted applications has expanded, the need for data consistency has dramatically increased.
The Forrester “What’s Ahead for PPM” report pointed out that integration provides much greater efficiency. “PPM tools on their own support project cost management, but as companies continue to mature in how they manage on an enterprise level, managers exhibit greater demand to reconcile project accounts without having to waste time exporting and manipulating data,” the report stated.
With IT departments playing a larger role in the deployment of high visibility corporate initiatives, the ability to connect data on resource allocation into ERP systems such as SAP, Oracle, and JD Edwards is becoming an important part of productivity analysis.
Checklist for Integrating in the Cloud
Some of the factors IT executives shouldconsider in their move to a cloud-based integration platform include:
Quick, reliable integration of critical business systems
Faster time-to-value through accelerated integration implementations
Lower cost to build and maintain an integration than traditional integration solutions
No need for expensive middleware, custom coding, or other integration tools
Out-of-box connectors
Pre-built business logic8
three different points: the network and facilities infrastructure, the application and platform layer, and the data level. This three-tiered security approach ensures that data is never exposed to unauthorized parties, remains safe in transit between applications, and that users can access the data whenever and wherever they want.
The Innotas Integration Platform is a required component of an organization’s overall enterprise architecture and
therefore is a strategic solution for helping IT address rapidly changing business needs, supporting alignment with the business, and propelling the agility of any organization that employs the tool.
The Innotas
Integration Platform
The Innotas Integration Platform differs from other tools because of its ability to integrate with hundreds of applications through out of-the-box connectors updated by Innotas. It also provides pre-built business logic and mapping processes developed by Innotas and offers end-to-end integration service managed by Innotas.
Security is always foremost on the minds of CIOs and IT managers when it comes to moving data to the cloud. The Innotas Integration Platform addresses security at
Innotas
111 Sutter Street, Suite 300 San Francisco, CA 94104 Tel: +1.415.263.9800 Toll-free: 1.866.692.7362
www.innotas.com - [email protected]
About Innotas: Innotas provides a ground-breaking cloud-based IT Governance solution —
an easy-to-use, rapid-to-deploy, and cost-effective way to manage resources and budgets across an IT department’s entire inventory of projects, portfolios, applications, assets, and service requests. With its strong foundation in Project Portfolio Management and Application Portfolio Management, Innotas provides CIOs and IT managers with visibility across both strategic initiatives and sustaining operations for improved decision making across the entire IT portfolio.
