How are IT assets optimized for greatest ROA and performance?
The IT Portfolio Management decision provides details about the company’s IT assets, how well these support the business, and what opportunities exist to improve IT ROA spending. For better performance, should you:
- Expand the portfolio by acquiring new IT assets?
- Invest more in existing IT assets to generate greater value?
- Retire obsolete or inefficient IT assets?
- Implement controls to reduce risk related to IT assets?
The three core categories and attributes of IT assets are infrastructure, applications and information. Using this decision area, IT can analyze:
- The inventory of physical IT assets (hardware, software, data sources and applications).
- Their properties (such as vendor and direct cost).
- Their core capabilities (such as flexibility, scalability, reliability, compatibility and availability).
To help with this analysis, the IT Portfolio Management decision area lets you set planning goals and scorecarding metrics for performance management elements such as:
- IT capability and efficiency indexes.
- Number of IT projects.
- IT direct and indirect costs ($).
- IT project costs.
- BI and general IT users (# & %).
- Ratings for IT asset availability, compatibility, reliability and scalability.
With a performance management system in this decision area, you can analyze these goals and metrics by a number of dimensions, including:
- IT project type and status.
- Company organization.
- Data source and IT infrastructure environment.
- IT priority.
- Data source.
Using the IT Portfolio Management decision area
As an IT professional, the IT Portfolio Management decision area let you ask questions such as:
- IT asset compatibility: Do I have weak or broken links in my information supply chain that affect the quality of decision-making?
- IT efficiency index: How much room is there to improve asset use for a specific infrastructure environment, to give me room for new IT projects?
- BI users: In what departments do I have the largest numbers of BI users, and it this affected by data sources?
Improving IT efficiency, however, is not enough. Most companies have tied 70 percent of their IT budget to non-discretionary items. You can't cut these "keeping the lights on" costs easily. You can gain additional and invaluable insight in this decision area by comparing how diverse IT assets work together to support specific areas of the business.
Think of these IT assets as belonging to an information supply chain that acquires, manages and delivers access to information for end users. Thinking in terms of shared and integrated supply chains delivering information and functionality makes it easier to explain how improvements to incomplete, complex or obsolete IT assets represent greater effectiveness and value to the company.
IT should set standards and document the core business metadata for the company. Consistent metadata and business rules are critical for information to become a trusted sweet spot in decision-making processes.
