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IT portfolio management is grounded in financial portfolio management, where dollars are appropriately distributed between risky and stable investments according to a person's profile and goals. Translated to IT, this means that technology executives have a holistic view of all IT projects and resources across the enterprise, and take new investment analysis from a business-need perspective first.
Companies that adopt portfolio management have strong IT governance in place, fostered by CIOs who have a solid grasp of business issues and communicate IT value across the executive team.
The top-level merits of IT portfolio management are:
- Helps IT directors establish project accountability
- Ensures open communication on funding approval and denials for new projects
- Balances investment risk and reward
- Helps IT and business leaders collaborate, and ensures IT addresses business priorities
- Eliminates overlapping and redundant projects
To successfully implement this approach, companies need a foundation of credible third-party ROI analysis on current and proposed projects, and an industry analysis to understand how new initiatives will achieve competitive gain.
Alinean's ValueIT™ software (http://www.alinean.com/ValueIT.asp) is the first comprehensive portfolio management toolkit specifically focused on competitive benchmarking and project analysis and improvement of ROI and Value of IT.
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