Intelligent IT Management for the Next-Generation Business World

Increased pressure from business demands to deliver value, reduce IT cost and improve service delivery have raised the stress levels between business and IT.

In addition, innovations in alternative IT service delivery models (SaaS and Cloud Sourcing) are escalating complexity for IT management. CIOs have options today that were unthinkable five years ago with cloud computing, on-demand, and multi-sourcing options.

CIOs are under intense pressure to provide transparency in order to align, perform and govern service delivery for the business. They are at the "hub" of the business and must provide 360° leadership and management.

Existing business and IT models cannot adapt quickly enough and cannot provide transparency for risk and decisions. Ultimately, current models cannot perform as expected and in a timely manner.

IT management is struggling with these issues:

1. Optimizing IT decisions for successful business outcomes
2. Making the right decision on IT priorities and investments
3. Establishing cost transparency and communication across IT functions on business value of cost
4. Identifying, measuring and controlling risk to achieve timely and expected business results
5. Controlling complex IT transformations by enabling an effective PMO function

Silo'd IT operations and lack of common language or linkage between the business and IT add to the CIO’s challenges.

Figure 1. Enterprise Landscape and Management Processes

IT Management Challenges

IT management struggles to address the complex issues that impact the organization’s effectiveness.

• How well are existing operations and new transformation initiatives aligned to the business strategies and goals? How can IT management effectively meld IT operations and change to meet business goals?
  
  • IT struggles with capturing the goals of the business and relating metrics to performance of operations and to transformation initiatives.
• Can IT management set reasonable and attainable expectations of cost, risk and timeliness of service delivery?
  
  • IT struggles with instantiating industry standards and baselines to set expectations and measure performance of services delivered.
• Does IT management have comprehensive transparency to operations required to deliver service?
  
  • IT struggles with a common view of understanding in how in-sourced and multi-sourced assets/services (people, processes and technologies) are leveraged and applied to operational performance.
• Can the CIO add value in the business decision and strategy process?
  
  • IT struggles with active analytics of business operations and providing predictive analysis and optimized or suggested alternative business models for service delivery. Included in both active and predictive models is information regarding risk, cost, efficiency, timeliness of delivery, and probability of success for the business.

Central to the problem is melding of technology, business process performance and financial management into a cohesive view of IT investments and priorities and successful execution of multi-sourced service delivery models to meet goals. The agreement by all stakeholders on meaning and application of metrics and how metrics correlate with business and IT capabilities to represent performance is central to this execution. This core problem needs to be addressed in an increasingly multi-sourced business environment driven by cloud computing, SaaS and other hybrid IT sourcing strategies.

What’s required is a new enterprise program and portfolio management (EPPM) approach and framework for the CIO and IT leaders. The new IT management solution needs to align, perform and govern IT activities based on the service value chain and provide the ability to directly compare cost with IT capabilities and business benefits.

Gravitant’s Vision

Gravitant^® offers a compelling vision to address the CIO challenges created by the evolving business and IT environment and the limitations of current solutions. Figure 2 shows Gravitant's strategic innovation that enables the vision.

Gravitant brings together three critical innovations required to address these challenges while leveraging content/data from existing business and technology solutions:

• Creation of a service management matrix that enables silo'd IT management functions to interact using the language of services while facilitating alignment with business performance goals. IT finance management, PMO, compliance and governance for the first time can collaborate effectively to manage IT to business goals.
• Creation of an intelligent analytics model and algorithms (operations research techniques) that parameterize the business services (architecture) layer to predict, sense and identify systemic impacts due to strategy, goal, performance and relationship changes – and corrective action. The goal is to systemically operationalize decisions at the CIO level to consistently innovate and meet performance goals.
• Creation of a management collaboration model, which provides the ability to connect planning, monitoring, analysis and governance processes.

This much needed capability leverages current solutions and investments. It allows business and technology leaders to visualize, navigate, strategize, innovate and manage an increasingly complex business and IT ecosystem with optimal decision making and intelligent governance.

Gravitant Provides Better IT Management Capability to IT Organizations

Gravitant’s EPPM solution is a next-generation IT management solution that is built on a service-based business/IT value chain. CIO/IT leaders can now effectively make investment decisions based on an analysis of business service, performance, risk, IT outsourcing and cost trade-offs, while the Project Management Office (PMO) can collaborate with business on process improvements, execute projects, control cost and institute change based on the language of services. IT operations managers can improve effectiveness of IT by using IT service level and cost parameters.

Gravitant’s EPPM solution is offered as an on-demand model to reduce cost, deliver customer value and accelerate adoption.

For more information on Gravitant Solutions and Products Contact Us or call Sales & Marketing at (512) 535-4732.

Learn more about:

Gravitant BusinessMatrix™

Business Correlation Methodology™

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