IT lifecycle management

		Govern IT An IT lifecycle imperative At any given moment, a multitude of IT projects are in various phases of completion, either making use of limited resources (money, personnel, hardware) or making a request for a portion of those resources. What can you do to manage this complexity – to prioritize, to redistribute, to govern?

IT leaders are asked to manage large portfolios of projects, with each project making unique hardware, software and labor demands. In the interest of operational efficiency and better IT-business alignment, it is imperative that decision makers be given the ability to make well-informed decisions about project prioritization and resource allocation.

The Govern IT imperative demands that organizations effectively manage portfolios, development projects and operational activities to optimize investment trade-offs.

Responsibilities include:

• Aligning and prioritizing IT investments against business goals.
• Acquiring real-time views of key metrics such as demand, resources, financials, and quality to ensure IT accountability and cost control.
• Gaining visibility into software development project progress and quality metrics to capture trends that potentially impact cost or schedule.
• Rendering cost-specific dashboards to visualize the health of key business systems and service level compliance to ensure quick response to violations.

The IBM IT lifecycle solution for the Govern IT imperative fulfills these requirements.

With IBM's assistance:

• CIOs can gain visibility into portfolios, development projects and operational activities to prevent unanticipated cost overruns and excess spending on non-priority projects.
• IT managers can identify IT service delivery problems before they occur. This allows you to take action to maintain service levels before downtime leads to lost productivity or revenue.
• IT managers can quickly determine the business - not just technical - impact of failures in the IT infrastructure. This allows you to prioritize IT repairs to ensure maximum 'up-time' for the business systems that are critical to core business operations.
• Application Development managers are provided a global view into the status of software development projects to ensure projects stay on schedule.
• Project managers and senior decision makers can keep projects on budget and on schedule by using the captured schedule, financial, resource and development project data to make real-time decisions.