IT Resource Planning

The new buzz word for companies looking to the future

An oft-heard mantra these days is aligning IT with the business. Many IT departments are struggling to evaluate how well they service their customers' needs or even to demonstrate what value they provide.

To make matters worse, they have no clearly defined way of linking potential demand for IT services with available supply, because any such information is generally held in functional or project-based silos within the organization that are difficult to get at, let alone manage proactively. But there is a new embryonic market category that is attempting to tackle just such thorny issues.

Although this nascent sector currently goes under many different names ranging from Forrester Research's Integrated IT Management to Ovum's IT governance, a particularly descriptive moniker has been proffered by AMR Research in the form of IT resource planning (ITRP).

While there are no guarantees that this will become the industry's designation of choice, it is nonetheless evocative of what IT departments are trying to achieve.

The idea behind ITRP as a product suite is to provide CIOs with enterprise resource planning (ERP)-like applications to help them undertake such tasks as identifying relevant stakeholders, defining their requirements and objectives, and establishing and managing how much time, money and resources will be needed to fulfil them.

Yet another aim is to centralize information emanating from key IT processes and procedures so that IT departments can generate reports in business language for executive managers, spelling out exactly what they are delivering and the value they are providing.

The core of IT governance is about knowing how the IT architecture fits together, how to manage it and how to plan for change. If the business has a requirement, how does it communicate that to the IT department? And how will that requirement affect the IT infrastructure, processes, resources and assets because once you've understood how it plays in with the rest of your everyday or strategic requirements, you can see the choices that you have going forward.

People are really starting to focus on this because they're trying to find ways to help the business be more efficient. It's all tied up with the aftermath of an industry that overspent, didn't meet expectations and then went through bad times, which has left the business jaded. In a way, IT is having to prove itself and vendors and services providers are also trying to find ways to make their offerings more saleable and bypass the cynicism.

But another issue that many IT organisations are finding is that they are unable to exploit new concepts and technologies such as service-oriented architectures effectively because they simply don't have the right underlying foundations in place to do so.

Interest in ITRP has been sparked off by the fact that many enterprises have transformed the way they operate to deal with an increasingly globalized market so it's now a matter of IT creating a strategy to deliver against that.

Companies have spent the last 10 years implementing systems such as ERP to try and deliver global business processes and they're pretty far along the way. But this means that IT can't remain in a siloed and fragmented form and has to transform itself to the new global way of doing business.

This siloed approach has traditionally meant that IT shops have spent too much time trying to pull information together from disparate systems to try and gain consistent visibility across the different processes making up IT.

But because there are no end-to-end application suites such as ERP available at the moment to help them do this, some firms are starting to take point solutions such as portfolio management and helpdesk and integrate them together themselves to try and obtain a consolidated view of the demand side of things.

Key elements of IT include project and portfolio management, resource and asset management, performance and change management, business and IT service management and service delivery. While individual tools to undertake such tasks exist today, there is currently no one single vendor with all of the pieces of the jigsaw in place and none that are able to feed all of the necessary information from the different pieces into a single underlying database.

As a result, vendors of all stripes are jumping into the melee with varying degrees of success. Large players such as Compuware, IBM and Mercury Interactive, of which AMR believes the latter to be the most advanced, have already amassed many of the elements and are starting work on integrating them.

Suppliers such as Hewlett Packard, Computer Associates (CA), BMC Software and Peregrine have, to date, concentrated mainly on the supply side of the equation, but are likely to flesh out the demand management piece over time, perhaps by partnering with different point product vendors or alternatively by acquisition.

There is also a range of new start-ups starting to make their presence felt, however, the two highest profile of which are ITM Software and Troux Technologies, while traditional ERP vendors such as SAP and some of the large systems integrators are also starting to sniff around, despite having failed to clarify their intentions to date.

On the bright side, the recognition that work needs to be done in this area has always been there and the thinking around it is maturing.

It's on people's radars from a strategic point of view, but for many, it's a very daunting prospect. You can start at this from many angles, but it's about how to join up the dots and because very few people have a greenfield site, they have to look at how they can migrate to something that will work in the future, while maintaining what they have.

The best approach is for IT directors to ask themselves what they're trying to do now and what they're trying to achieve in the future and to match that against the IT architecture, people and processes that they already have in place.

The next step is to undertake gap and risk analyses and map the outcomes to the IT department's strategic aims, before starting on small scale process re-engineering and automation projects to fill the biggest holes, whether that means resourcing, project management or hitting service level agreements.

But there may be downsides to going with the forthcoming end-to-end application suite approach too. On the one hand, large suites are likely to be complex and lead to more complicated and longer product selection cycles.

On the other hand, unless IT organizations and vendors are careful to use their existing knowledge and expertise, there is always the danger that the long implementation times, which gave ERP a bad name a decade ago, could be repeated in a future ITRP world.