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gabrielgomane
Retired

Companies use IT portfolio management (ITPM) to capture this business perspective, in addition to assessing the IT landscape. Joining ITSM and ITPM together can create positive synergy between IT and business groups and help IT departments reach their goals.

With the digital revolution and the move to the cloud, IT departments have to rethink how they deliver services and bring value to the business. Long viewed as a cost center, IT departments can be a partner that helps business groups grow a company by delivering innovative IT solutions.

Even with an ITSM solution in place, IT departments still struggle to reduce costs and gain agility, usually because they are swamped with legacy assets that accumulated over the years. They can’t eliminate them because there is no clear picture of how the IT assets are used by business groups. There is no business view or link to business objectives. It is often difficult to get a proper answer to many questions, such as:

  • How can we identify redundant assets?
  • Are we investing in the right applications?
  • How can we make sure IT goals are aligned with business objectives?

That’s why most companies want to establish an ITPM practice to understand the business value of their IT assets while enforcing the standards of ITPM.

  • ITPM begins by identifying the business capabilities and/or business processes of the company and linking them to applications. IT leaders can then clearly understand how each application supports business activities. The IT team can track costly redundant applications easily, when it is known that two or more applications support the same capability.
  • ITPM solutions help IT departments rationalize the IT landscape by assessing assets based on multiple perspectives … cost, technical efficiency, business value and many more. ITPM solutions help with this assessment by crowdsourcing the information to business and IT owners. The information from these stakeholders is used to assess the company’s entire application portfolio.
  • Following this process allows IT portfolio managers to rank each application and decide which ones to eliminate, invest in, tolerate or migrate. ITPM also helps IT leaders plan the transformation of the IT landscape by creating and comparing multiple transformation scenarios based on business outcomes.

So how can ITSM and ITPM solutions coexist together in IT departments since they both deal with IT assets? In general, ITPM solutions deal with strategic activities and IT planning, while ITSM is about managing operational activities, such as ticketing, end-user self-services, configuration management and asset discovery.

When both solutions coexist, ITPM often becomes the system of record for applications because ITPM is the primary place for managing applications and assessing them under IT and business perspectives. ITPM also helps with technologies. Technologies can certainly be managed in CMDBs, but they can be approved in ITPM to make sure they comply with defined standards so that projects only use the right technologies.

Integrating ITSM with an ITPM practice creates a continuous loop of integrated information that helps IT departments drive their strategic and tactical activities. It helps rationalize the IT landscape and produce flexibility because of the business view that ITPM brings to IT assets.

Many IT stakeholders will benefit from this integration:

  • portfolio directors will get a better vision of the IT strategy
  • architects will better cope with the speed of IT delivery and constant changes
  • IT project leaders can check faster whether a new technology is approved, thus improving the speed of delivery.

Watch our 2-minute video to to see how HOPEX IT Portfolio Management can boost the value of your ITSM practice and help streamline your IT assets:

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