IT ARCHITECTURE PORTFOLIO MANAGER

EFFECTIVELY LEVERAGE, OPTIMIZE AND MANAGE
YOUR ENTIRE IT ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE

What is your challenge as you see it?

“As a Director of IT Architecture, I do not have much room for originality, seemingly. I no longer can think in terms of the conceptual, four-layered approach to Architecture – my processes, applications, data and physical architecture components. My job is centered on large enterprise apps, such as Office collaboration, Finance, HR, Manufacturing and distribution apps. Then, based on my enterprise and office apps, I select hardware, servers and SAN around it. My challenges are technology optimization, data center nimbleness and legacy decommissioning.”

What solutions do you have today?

”Today, we have inventories of our applications, our servers and our licenses, contacts owners, spend etc., in spreadsheets. We have a six-member architecture group that is supposed to manage across all spreadsheets – for licensing, processing services, application management and end user computing. Within every group, there are many sub-levels of spreadsheets: for inventories, resources and spend spreadsheets. As you would expect, we meet on three accounts: as a reaction to a vendor software release, or as a reaction to a business need which affects enterprise apps, or as a reaction to a spend thrust from finance. And we create justification to what gets spent on what and why.”

What exactly do you need and why is it different?

First, you need an architecture portfolio that cuts across projects and applications. You need that integration to start with, since some projects are enhancements to existing apps, and some projects are purely enhancing the infrastructure. You then need to map all apps to all business processes, and the apps are keyed on business priorities and strategic objectives. You need a complete handle of the entire enterprise: across business processes, the applications that serve those business processes, and the underlying common base software and data architecture, based on the inventory of banks of servers and end-user computing devices, all in one.

What does GRIP Application Portfolio Manager do? (What are its features?)

GRIP-IT Architecture Portfolio Manager is a powerful workflow engine, a multi-dimensional portfolio analyzer, as well as a metrics-decision support engine. Manager captures the complete inventory of business processes, applications, data architecture and the physical architecture that supports them. GRIP-IT Architecture Portfolio Managers achieves that information at the foundation level. It also enables all the workflow to keep that twin-inventory mapping current and up-to-date. GRIP Architecture Portfolio Manager links to physical server inventories and the base software licenses. GIRP Architecture Portfolio Manager provides a complete framework for managing your architecture, both hardware and software, in a comprehensive manner.

Part of the Bigger Picture…

GRIP-IT Architecture Portfolio Manager is part of the overarching GRIP management framework.