Gartner EA: Effective IT Planning
Presenter: Robert Handler
He’s showing a slide on IT Portfolio Management Theory, and how there is a discovery phase, a project phase, and an asset management phase. Discovery explores new technology, projects implement new technology, and the asset management phase operates it once it’s in production. Next, he’s shown an Enterprise Architecture diagram and discusses the whole current state/future state approach, risk tolerance principles, etc. He now has a slide with a summary of three areas: IT Strategic Planning, Project & Portfolio Management, and Enterprise Architecture. He shows that all three of these have overlapping goals and efforts that could be better aligned because at present, they tend to exist in vacuums.
He’s now talking about some of the issues with each of these disciplines. First, he used Wikipedia’s definition of technology strategy to show the challenge there (Wikipedia claims it’s a document created by the CIO, the audience chuckled at that). On to Project and Portfolio Management, he’s calling out that only 65% of organizations cover the entire enterprise in their portfolio, and most PPMs are focused on prioritizing projects. On the EA side, he calls out that most efforts are mired in the creation of technical standards.
His recommendations for creating a win/win situation are:
- Collectively maintain, share, and use business context.
- Use EA to validate strategic planning and improve portfolio management decisions.
- Use portfolio management to generate updates against IT strategy and EA design and plans.
He proceeded to go into detail on each of these. Overall, I think this was a good 100-level presentation to tell an audience of EA’s that they can’t ignore IT strategy efforts and PPM efforts. They need to be aligned with them. It could have been a bit more pragmatic to emphasize how one would go about doing this.
3 Responses to “Gartner EA: Effective IT Planning”
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Interesting.. can you share the presentation?
sorry, Gartner maintains the distribution rights for the slides, you would need to contact them.
This is really interesting. I am a relatively new EA and am just starting to grasp the parallels between EA and strategy formation.
I found Mintzberg really interesting on the strategy stuff, Porter is really good for commercial organisations but since I’m in the public sector we don’t really do competition and strategy formation is essentially a political process: this politicises EA and represents a significant threat to the success of our programme.