Posted by Tim Madewell on Fri, Feb 03, 2012
We have had a number of conversations with customers and prospect that mentioned having a corporate or IT-driven “cloud initiative”. After hearing this, we’ve reflected on the rapid change of cloud solutions from the early adopters and point solutions to broader acceptance of cloud solutions within enterprise IT.
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We now see purpose-driven initiatives toward cloud solutions for the enterprise. Cloud software for the enterprise has rapidly matured and gained acceptance, which is exciting and validates how we’ve built our business model. So it comes as no surprise to us that we see increasing demand for cloud integration. |
According to a recent article by InformationWeek titled “6 Reasons SaaS May Mean A Return To Silos “, a survey showed that 43% of SaaS users are very happy with the ability to deploy applications quickly, but are much less satisfied with the complexity of integrating hosted apps with on-premise systems and data sources (see: InformationWeek Analytics 2011 Enterprise Applications Survey). While we don’t agree with the assumption that SaaS (cloud) means a return to silos, we do find the survey results consistent with conversations that we have had with IT executives. The requirements for easy data availability and timely information for decision-making have not changed. Cloud solutions have introduced new integration points, and computing devices have introduced new platforms. We argue that the rapid adoption of cloud initiatives will drive the advancement and development of cloud integration strategies, solutions, and interfaces.
We have witnessed enterprises becoming more thoughtful toward integration and interoperability in their evaluation of cloud solutions, recognizing the need to have ubiquitous access to their data. This is especially true when more enterprise systems are moving to the cloud. Data access should make no difference in a cloud-to-premise, cloud-to-cloud, or any other hybrid model. Additionally, rigid system integrations are giving way to loosely coupled integrations that share data and enrich applications from other data sources.
A relevant example of this need for integrating enterprise applications and tools with the Innotas IT Management solutions has been the increasing number of customer integrations that we are seeing with other work management and project tracking tools such as Atlassian’s Jira . Jira is one of the most trusted and leading project tracking tools that has seen great adoption from small workgroups and expansion across the enterprise. Innotas has been building integrations to reach beyond the borders of work management in Innotas to incorporate data from complimentary tools such as Jira. The goal is to bring work activity back to the enterprise project and application portfolio. The challenge of any IT Management solution such as Innotas is how to capture work across the entire enterprise to provide governance and decision making as it relates to time, people, and money across the entire organization, not just IT. IT leaders recognize that departments and teams across the enterprise have different work management requirements. Providing these groups with access to the best tools to do their job yields better results than forcing everyone to use a single, one-size-fits-all work management system to serve top management’s need for visibility and governance. Enterprise cloud integration solutions enables enterprises to use tools such as Jira, any on-premise, or cloud solution as best-of-class system in areas such as operations and product development, which feed activity, resource, and time data to an enterprise IT Management system for IT portfolio governance.
Mapping example between Jira and Innotas
It is time to look at the clouds overhead and then a thorough viewat your corporate data and integration strategy.
Posted by kevin kern on Fri, Jan 06, 2012
No one can know for sure what the future holds but there are certain predictions that help us navigate the tides of the changing economies in 2012. Studying these forecasts allow us to make informed decisions about how we invest time, money, and resources against our financial goals.
We were recently invited to participate in a conference call on the outlook for IT spending in 2012, featuring a speaker from InformationWeek.
There are a couple of points worth mentioning from this conference call:
- IT spend in 2012 is generally going to be increased over 2011, which some might think is underwhelming news given the challenges we all faced in 2011.
- The overall demand on IT is going to increase as business units seek to find ways to optimize their business processes.
- Lastly, because of cuts in years past, IT’s ability to adapt to change, and the notion that IT is considered an integral part of the business expansion, projected hiring in IT organizations is going to rise in 2012.
These predictions are no surprise to us.
We have always believed that as new innovative technologies sprout, the demand to utilize, deploy, and maintain them by IT organizations corresponds. The explosion of social media, cloud computing, and self service applications in 2011 was phenomenal, and the IT staff answered the call once again by implementing these applications at an exceptional pace. We believe this demand highlights the importance of project and portfolio management solutions because, as demand increases, delivery response times from IT will too. This can only be effectively executed by using solutions such as Innotas’ PPM and APM to manage time, money, and resources, which is something we’ve espoused for many years.
It is also worth mentioning that today’s IT staff is effective at adjusting and adapting their work efforts to long term projects. They are very good at building and deploying in increments while articulating value to the business with each increment, and if budgets change or business growth decreases, they are able to “put on the brakes” and allocate resources elsewhere. Project and program visibility into each IT initiative enables fast and accurate decision making while saving time and money. Fact.
Our core business is based on empowering CIO’s, IT VP’s, directors, and project managers to effectively manage the many demands placed on them. We believe in their mission and will continue to support the trends for growth or reduction, whatever the future holds, IT will need tools to deal with both. We will be waiting and ready as always.
Given the trends of 2011 and projections for 2012 , including mobile applications, marketing applications, personalization, and big data, the demands on IT organization will continue to proliferate and IT will continue to answer the call.
We don’t say it’s easy, we say it’s possible!
Happy New Year.
Posted by kevin kern on Mon, Dec 12, 2011
After reading an article from ZDNET this week about Gartner’s predictions for 2012, it occurred to me that while well-written and provocative, the narrative was foreboding for IT organizations. The premise that cloud computing spending increasingly lands outside of IT and therefore will likely diminish the roles and responsibilities of the IT organization has some merit. This prediction can be proven wrong if IT managers are willing to make adjustments to how “business as usual” is done.
Other “doomsayers” have even predicted that IT will cease to be relevant outside of maintaining development projects and services for internal use only. On behalf of Innotas, I’d like to state that we don’t share that view. We will continue to believe and invest in solutions that support IT staff with tools that monitor, track, trace, and measure the work that IT delivers to its end user community. It is our mission to help IT organizations move away from simply being viewed as a cost center to be seen as more of a value center and strategic business partner. Delivering projects and work on time and on budget proves the value of any organization regardless of nomenclatures.
Innotas and the IT organizations that we serve face many challenges when implementing APM and PPM solutions. But, in our opinion, the biggest barrier to entry is cultural. We often hear that IT is too busy to evaluate PPM and IT Governance software and there are too many competing projects to make decisions now versus later. As General George Patton once said, “A good plan executed today is far better than a perfect plan executed tomorrow”. People in IT should give serious consideration to this notion or the pundits may be proven correct. We believe there is no substitute for accountability, visibility, and productivity now versus later. Innotas continues to build innovative solutions supporting that idea. The DNA of most IT staff, in our view, is to say YES in an effort to please everyone, yet doing so without visibility into priorities and resources nor aligning these with the business strategy can have disastrous outcomes.
The debate around centralized IT and decentralized IT has existed for many years but, given the many SaaS offerings in the market, this debate is heightened for 2012. Our advice is simple: Act now, avoid excuses, and prioritize the acquisition of solutions that enable IT organizations to become more productive and transform them into the value center and strategic business partner that they should be.
If this can be done then business end-users will realize what they have now before it’s gone. Its IT’s job to communicate that today not tomorrow.
Posted by Olena Canessa on Mon, Dec 05, 2011
With the year coming to a closing, organizations are wrapping up remaining projects and start setting priorities and objectives for 2012.
One of the main challenges continues to be in defining goals and objectives for the upcoming 12 months and utilizing limited resources in the IT organization in most efficient and effective way.
Some of the common questions CIOs may find themselves asking during this stage of planning are:
- What is the demand on my organization and how can I effectively manage it?
- Which projects are the most crucial and deliver the most value?
- Do I need to revisit and reevaluate my current investments in applications, resources, and infrastructure?
- And finally, the most important one, how can I keep my customers happy?
What are some of the priorities for CIOs out there? Take John Halamaka, CIO at CareGroup Heallthcare System, CIO and associate dean for educational technology at Harvard Medical School, . Heoutlined his three priorities for 2012 in a recent article in the online version of the
CIO Magazine.
John’s focus in the upcoming year will be around issues such as:
- Identifying key business customers and ensuring that their priorities are reflected in the current IT operating plan as well as strategic plan
- Standardizing communications to receive updates on a top-priority projects
- Defining the process of managing IT projects across the enterprise which includes IT intake process, IT Project lifecycle, and project management tools
In order to effectively manage these priorities, CIO should evaluate whether their IT organization has the right project and resource management tools in place that allow IT management to evenly allocate resources throughout the organization, managing incoming demand, obtain instantaneous status reports, adjust existing portfolios in case business objectives change due to the internal changes (such as budget or management shifts, etc).
After all, CIOs are the pioneers of innovation and change within any organizations; they are empowering their team to achieve greater efficiency by giving them the right tools to succeed. And nowadays when the selection of these toolsets is quite broad, IT directors can find a solution that will fit their business needs without hurting the main IT wallet or taking years of implementation to go live.
If your team is planning to evaluate PPM toolsets in the upcoming year, you may find reports from Gartner analysts to be quite valuable in your research – click here for a MQ and MS reports.
- Innotas Team
Posted by kevin kern on Thu, Nov 17, 2011
By Kevin Kern, CEO, Innotas
A recent Gartner study found that enterprises spend only one-third of their IT budgets on strategic projects, with the majority being spent on sustaining activities. This situation often stems from a combination of factors: limited visibility into all project work, sporadic alignment with business goals, inadequate project prioritization and minimal executive sponsorship.
With this change, IT organizations need a new focus on:
- Increasing the return on both current and new IT investments
- Utilize technology and IT best practices to help increase value to shareholders and stakeholders
To transform itself into a strategic organization, IT must gain visibility into and control over the myriad operations under its purview—projects, applications, assets, and service requests.
To read the full article published in IndustryWeek, click here.
Posted by Olena Canessa on Mon, Nov 14, 2011
By George Shaheen, Sales Engineer at Innotas
A common challenge among Innotas customers can be summed up in a simple question: How do I manage the demand on my IT organization and ensure we are doing the right work (projects, enhancements) – the work that aligns with overall business objectives and delivers value for the entire organization?
A lot of the time, work is chosen for execution reactively with no push back (“let’s just get it done as soon as we can”), based on a single person’s decision (“Joe thought about it and thinks we should do this first”), or politically driven (“The CxO want this done now!”).
So, how do we avoid these pitfalls and ensure all the work we choose to do aligns with our company’s overall business objectives?
The answer is actually simpler than expected. Most IT departments already have a process in place through which they receive requests for work (projects, enhancements, etc). By simply adding one more step to this process in which incoming requests are scored based on a generally accepted scoring framework, the IT department can properly ensure that the highest scoring (best aligned) work is selected for execution. This framework will be different for every company (some common aspects are risk, value, and business alignment). So how do we go about developing a scoring framework?
Here’s a simple checklist:
- Setup a scoring framework(s)
- Develop the framework collaboratively (identify who makes decisions now and get them all in a room together). Be sure to explain the benefits of a scoring framework.
- Be sure to think about multiple frameworks. A project scoring framework may be significantly more in-depth than an enhancement request scoring framework.
- Apply the framework(s)
- Add a step to the work request and approval process and ensure all work goes through the scoring process.
- Revisit the framework(s)
- Do this annually. Things naturally change, and with that change, there may be tweaks required to your scoring process.
- Score and rescore inflight work
- Do this when you first implement your scoring framework. Kill projects that don’t make the cut, keep the ones that do, and use that freed up resource capacity to execute more relevant work.
- After making changes to your framework (if any), re-score your current in-flight work to ensure your work is still aligned to business objectives.
By implementing the outlined process, you can:
- Ensure the right work gets selected for execution based on how well it aligns with business objectives.
- Free resource capacity from irrelevant work, allowing for more strategic work to get done.
- Eliminate reactively acting to work requests, single points of failure, or politically driven decision making.
Have a good time setting this up and let us know if you’d like to talk about it.
Posted by kevin kern on Mon, Nov 07, 2011
A recent article published by CIO.com about the changing role and job requirements of the CIO resonated with us for several reasons. First, the talent pool for the CIO position as ascribed in the article differs a bit from years past. Secondly, the characteristics and requirements for this role are shifting. Lastly, the expectations for the “modern day CIO” have evolved prompting a new paradigm for staffing the position.
The job requirements for today’s CIOs and IT leaders demand stronger business acumen in addition to the traditional technical proficiencies required in past years. It’s not sufficient to have a solid understanding of technology given the business demands and decisions that CIO’s are responsible for in today’s fluctuating environment. For example, consider the impact of cloud computing on IT and business strategy in general. Now that most of the sustaining, non strategic work that CIO’s were chartered with is being outsourced then it follows that the skill set of a CIO would probably demand modification.
Today’s executives are far more tech savvy and don’t require as much hand holding. The technology skill set once required to source CIOs will continue to shift from traditional technology backgrounds to experience in other management functions and global business experience. The importance of connecting the advantages of technology to real business problems is now a critical characteristic of the makeup of the “modern day CIO”. Buying and implementing technology for the sake of it and without the business strategy in mind is a dead thought process in 2011. Connecting the dots between the tools and the value to an organization and its users is here to stay.
The impact of globalization, recession, cloud computing, and IT governance on CIOs are impacting the role and the skill set for the better. IT should always have a “seat at the table” to ensure that the available technologies are impacting the business in the right ways.
Big changes ahead to be sure, but the one thing that won’t change is the importance of the CIO role to any organization regardless of the shifting demands of the position.
Posted by kevin kern on Wed, Oct 26, 2011
In order to optimize the allocation of an organization’s budgets and resources, IT decision makers should embrace application portfolio management (APM). IT executives often realize the benefits of having a well-established project and resource management processes while proper application portfolio management ends up not getting sufficient attention. However, having access to a full application inventory as well as transparency of how much each individual application costs an organization on a yearly basis drives a big part of a decision making process when it comes to investing precious dollars into strategic work versus sustaining work.
Organizations run multiple applications that help manage different aspects of their internal and external operations – finance, human resources, accounting, sales support,supply chain, inventory and manufacturing systems to name a few. Departments often use different software solutions, such as SAP, Microsoft, ADP, Oracle, and Salesforce to help manage each of these business functions.
The main challenge for IT as it relates to application portfolio management, is to identify the applications that are worth the investment versus those that might not be. Jim Duggan, the Gartner research analyst focusing on application development, writes that a top-down analysis of an application portfolio enables APM processes to focus attention on the areas of greatest opportunity.
Thus, TIME (Tolerate, Invest, Migrate, and Eliminate) analysis has proven to be useful tool for structuring the sorting of applications in a company’s portfolio.
Screenshot from Innotas APM solution:
After all the applications are divided into four categories, a deeper analysis of the application portfolio can be performed.
Tolerate – applications that are creating enough business value and have manageable costs but should be maintained for various reasons.
Invest – ideally we need to strive to place all existing portfolio of application under this category. These are the most lucrative and investment-worthy applications that bring enough revenue and help streamline operations.
Migrate – applications that need modernization and no are no longer worth the investment.
Eliminate – this category consists of applications that have low business value and even high risks. Therefore, they are of no real value to the organization and need to be eliminated.
The application scoring functionality embedded in APM solutions can help organizations to form these TIME categories based on higher or lower scores obtained for each application. Duggan writes that grouping applications according to their characteristics is a meaningful way of categorizing the inventory and defining the destinies of the applications in the portfolio cycle. A focused analysis of the areas that will most likely yield improvements reduce analytic and data collection efforts, without forgoing the most promising opportunities.
APM not only adds significant value to the overall IT Governance within the organization, but also gives much needed visibility to support decision making when it comes to CIOs. By determining which applications should be outsourced, updated, or retired, management can free up financial resources and reinvest into applications with higher ROI that contribute to strategic business goals. Thus APM can drive IT operations and provide CIOs with much needed clarity on efficiency of their operations and execution of strategic objectives.
Posted by Olena Canessa on Mon, Oct 10, 2011
In an era of increasing IT complexity, it’s hard to imagine new PPM solutions running in a standalone mode. In today’s agile business environment, project managers should have access to the most current data about resources and finances in order to successfully manage existing projects and keep generating revenue. Properly allocating labor, tracking time, and measuring associated costs are ultimate success factors for any given IT project.
Cloud integration enables seamless transfer of the most current data records to your PPM solution, which facilitates the collaboration between various departments. Constant communication between systems will ensure that only the most accurate information is being delivered, so that IT directors can make time-sensitive decisions or necessary adjustments in regards to resource allocation or project budgets when needed.
According to Margo Visitacion, leading PPM analyst from Forrester Research Inc., PPM solutions should not be and cannot be a standalone tool regardless of an organization’s maturity. The future of the PPM lies in successful integration with other applications such as HR, finance, help desk, and so forth. These applications can add valuable information to any IT project that can influence the timelines or even purpose of its execution. Thus, HR systems can provide you with the data on the availability of resources, accounting and finance systems can supply data on cost-allocation and financial management, which will ultimately facilitate the collaboration across departments and reduce the risk of data duplication and repetition. Therefore, cloud integration not only facilitates the project management process, but allows a PMO to function in sync with other important systems within the organization.
There is more than one way to integrate various systems. However, the traditional ways of doing the integration included complex coding, middleware, and even additional hardware purchases, which had proven to be costly and time-consuming. Today many integration solutions allow companies to build, deploy, and manage integrations between systems within the matter of days and a low fraction of costs.
The Innotas Integration Platform enables quick and reliable integration of multiple business systems and delivers faster time-to-value.This flexible and simple integration solution enables seamless connectivity with any cloud and on-premise applications.
To shed more light on integration in the cloud, Innotas will host a complimentary webinar, featuring a special guest from Dell Boomi – Rick Nucci. Rick, who is currently in the role of company’s CTO, will share best practices on how to manage the development and maintenance of application integration in the cloud. To learn more about cloud and on-premise integration, join us for a 60-min webinar on October 18th to discover the best practices from the industry’s leading cloud integration solution.
- Innotas Team
Posted by kevin kern on Tue, Oct 04, 2011
San Francisco is hosting Oracle’s annual OpenWorld this week, and we can’t help but think about why this is such an important event. It’s not simply the infusion of cash into the local economy or the thousands of customers that will attend all the festivities. More importantly, it’s about the relevance and breadth of the partnerships that Oracle has formed over the years, which helped fuel the company’s growth.
We’ve recen
tly viewed a presentation by Apptio, the originators of Technology Business Management (TBM). Aside from the impressive introduction to TBM and why it is a critical technology, it was plain to see that Apptio too will benefit from choosing the right partners in the same ways as Oracle did.
Any technology that can affect positive results and maximize value by consolidating multiple data inputs for Information Technology (IT) is and always will be of great interest to any IT organization. Our industry is always looking for ways to optimize and create efficiencies within our supply chains. IT is no different. Instead of raw material, inventory, and manufactured goods, the supply chain for IT often consists of resources, applications, and both non-project and project work. As long as IT has been in existence, the challenge has always been to move from a cost center to a value center approach and philosophy.
Apptio has made a yeoman’s run at providing a solution that incorporates demand management, IT planning, IT and vendor performance, which ultimately leads to IT transparency impelling what we see as the true creation of the “value center”. A philosophy that Innotas shares with Apptio. So often in the past companies have missed this mark by either over engineering or not focusing on IT.
We see the Innotas PPM and APM solutions as ancillary to what’s being offered by Apptio and look ahead with enthusiasm to see which companies they will partner with in the IT space. Managing people, time, and money will always be at the forefront of any enterprise. Therefore any offering that consolidates multiple data points to give a clear and concise view of IT performance will endure.