According to Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR), the biggest fault of IT management to date has been its failure to build the kind of comprehensive view into IT that allows CIOs to answer basic questions posed by executives, such as “What is everyone working on?” and “Why does that project require more funding?” Ironically, IT provides business managers and executives with an understanding of business events and their consequences via dashboards, but CIOs have been operating blindly. New research from Forrester points to a convergence of disciplines that will result in an integrated IT management (IIM) dashboard, allowing IT managers to reduce IT budgets by as much as 30 percent while realizing value increases of 10 to 15 percent in the first year.

“We see IIM as a natural progression of related management and execution practices that will provide a consolidated view across all of IT with fact-based information on spending and human and technical resources,” said Margo Visitacion, principal analyst at Forrester. “Without this visibility, CIOs lack the management information required to sit at the executive level and risk being replaced by someone who can manage resources, whether internally or offshore.”

This newfound ability for CIOs to show management what’s really happening in IT is one of the biggest benefits of IIM. Other benefits include:

  • A dashboard with requests, priorities, resource allocation, schedules, and completed activities.
  • Centralized IT work requests for a true sense of demands against IT resources.
  • Enterprisewide views that permit cross-enterprise resource allocation.
  • A business-level view of concurrent and conflicting IT priorities.
  • High-level analysis and reporting, with drill-downs into specific metrics.

The ongoing requirement for IT to demonstrate its business value is one compelling reason to bring together operational, new project, and existing system data in a single view. Other trends that drive IIM include the need for IT to:

  • Balance resource capacity with resource consumption across the entire organization.
  • Rationalize applications as the effort to maintain existing systems consumes 76 percent of IT budgets.
  • Provide end-to-end service levels for business-critical applications due to the advent of srvice orientation.

Although a complete solution is 24 to 36 months away, the authors, Margo Visitacion, Phil Murphy, and Thomas Mendel, Ph.D., offer evidence of a burgeoning market, noting that Forrester is already seeing results from the portfolio management disciplines that will make up IIM.

  • Project portfolio management (PPM) saved companies 20 to 40 percent with a consolidated view of the project pipeline that allows IT to kill redundant projects and select projects with the strongest payoff.
  • Application portfolio management (APM) provided companies with efficiency gains through reduced operational and maintenance costs.
  • Enterprise infrastructure management (EIM) helped companies discover overlaps in products used to manage different infrastructure domains.

The research, entitled “Integrated IT Management Drives Efficiency,” also discusses the vendor landscape and the possible activity as these silos of information begin to join forces. This report is available to WholeView 2™ clients and can be found at www.forrester.com.