Integrated IT Management technology will slash 30% off IT budgets

Integrated IT Management (IIM) is a management technique that enables IT management to reduce IT budgets by as much as 30% while realising value increases of 10% to 15% in the first year.

That's according to Thomas Cronje, QA architect at Compuware SA who adds that these gains are achievable even though IIM is still in its infancy.

Compuware Corporation, a global leader in providing software and services that maximise the value of IT assets, believes that IT can be a real enabler for organisations, delivering strategic value, but needs to be well managed in order to do this.

Cronje says that IIM solutions present a dashboard level view of IT activity, centralised collection and distribution of work requests. "These solutions offer a means of presenting a complete picture of the performance and value contribution of the IT organisation, which enables resource allocation according to business needs and the reduction of IT waste."

Compuware's Integrated IT Management offering is a portfolio of the company's solutions that address the broad area of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). The company's most recent move into project and portfolio management provides the high-level governance that many IT departments are beginning to demand. It also provides comprehensive professional services to assist its customers optimising their IT investments.

A Forrester report (2 February 2005 - Integrated IT Management Drives Efficiency by Margo Visitacion, Phil Murphy and Thomas Mendel, PhD.) on IIM explains that dashboard type views permit business managers and executives to see business events and understand their subsequent impact, allowing them to take corrective action.

Forrester believes that convergence across infrastructure-monitoring software, Application Portfolio Management (APM) and Project Portfolio Management (PPM) will culminate in Integrated IT Management (IIM) dashboards.

"Standalone APM and PPM solutions are not new. However, there is a lot to gain by having an integrated overview - it helps companies define what they should keep in-house and what they should outsource. In fact, Forrester says that 15-20% of the global top 3500 companies are currently looking at an integrated solution, as it plays a valuable role in sourcing strategies," Cronje adds.

"IIM is the natural progression of the building blocks available today in PPM, APM, and enterprise infrastructure management (EIM) solutions, by drawing them into a single, cohesive dashboard that provides role-based views of IT activity."

He believes IIM will mature rapidly, driven by the following trends:

• IT needs to balance resources across organisational boundaries;
• application rationalisation booms, driven by APM capabilities; and
• a boom in service orientation that will demand end-to-end service management.

He points out that if the IT department or organisation is to remain a viable business partner, IT management must develop the sort of metrics that enable other managers in the enterprise to manage their resources, be they people, widgets, projects, products, or prospects.

"Management at all levels needs better information about spending and human resources. IT must improve the information on which the company bases business decisions.

"Compuware enables corporate IT departments to align and monitor their entire IT portfolio of investments including projects, applications and infrastructure. Effective portfolio management requires real-time access to accurate, business critical data," he concludes.