Confidential

Business Technology Management and the

Enterprise Portfolio

A Troux White Paper

February 2012

White Paper

2 CONFIDENTIAL

Contents Executive Summary ................................................................................................................................. 3

Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 4

Business Technology Management .......................................................................................................... 5

The IT Planning Ecosystem....................................................................................................................... 6

The Journey to BTM ................................................................................................................................ 9

The Enterprise Portfolio......................................................................................................................... 10

The Enterprise Portfolio is Critical to High Priority Initiatives ................................................................. 14

Application Portfolio Management .................................................................................................... 15

M&A .................................................................................................................................................. 15

Cloud Planning................................................................................................................................... 16

Investment Management .................................................................................................................. 17

Solution Architecture ......................................................................................................................... 17

Change Management ........................................................................................................................ 18

The Troux Approach .............................................................................................................................. 19

Appendix: A Parable that Enlightens ...................................................................................................... 23

White Paper

3 CONFIDENTIAL

Executive Summary

CIO’s can better respond to the needs to reduce cost, improve compliance, and be more agile in

countering competitive threats by applying the principles of Business Technology Management

(BTM). Foundational to BTM is the Enterprise Portfolio. The Enterprise Portfolio is a

repository that contains information about the sum of all IT portfolios (Applications, Projects,

Technologies and Information) and their relationships to each other and to the Business

Portfolios (Business Architecture and Business Strategies).

The Enterprise Portfolio delivers analytics that greatly improve the processes that constitute

the BTM program. Furthermore an Enterprise Portfolio approach is critical to success for high

priority CIO initiatives such as Application Portfolio Management, Cloud Migration, M&A, etc.

Troux provides a solution that implements an Enterprise Portfolio approach to BTM that offers

a combination of software and know-how that insures customer success and self-sufficiency.

White Paper

4 CONFIDENTIAL

Introduction

CIO’s are faced with three major challenges: Cost, Compliance, and Competitive Threats.

We know that for most enterprises the IT budget allocated to “keep the lights on” is large --- up

to 80% of the IT budget. These costs are directly tied to sprawl & complexity that have come

about due to M&A or simply undisciplined growth over time.

Compliance is on everyone’s mind and since it is the IT systems that at the end of the day that

implement most of the business processes --- understanding those systems and how they

support the business is paramount to being responsive to compliance mandates.

Competitive Threats come about because the complexity of IT hinders agility and soaks up

innovation dollars that would be better spent improving the competitive stance.

It is these business drivers that are behind the strong interest in improving how IT supports the

business through Business Technology Management (BTM).

White Paper

5 CONFIDENTIAL

Business Technology Management

Wikipedia1 defines Business Technology Management (BTM) as:

“Business technology management (BTM) is a management science that seeks to unify

business and technology decision-making at every level in an enterprise. …

BTM builds bridges between previously isolated tools and standards for business

technology management by strategically incorporating both operational and

infrastructure levels of technology management to ensure that an enterprise’s business

strategy can be realized by the technology it deploys.”

Simply put, BTM brings together IT technology planning tools, processes and investments to

deliver improved business value. Of course this raises the question of what are these tools,

processes and investments and how can they best be orchestrated to deliver on the promise of

BTM?

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_technology_management

White Paper

6 CONFIDENTIAL

The IT Planning Ecosystem

Figure 1 is a representation of the common IT planning systems deployed in most enterprises

today. In this diagram these systems are depicted in an ecosystem based on the types of

information they contain and the processes they enable. The horizontal ordinate represents

the spectrum of “run the Business” information to “change the Business” information and the

vertical axis represents whether the information is operational in nature or strategic in nature.

The positioning of the various systems is subjective, but generally speaking relative placement

represents the nature of each of these systems and the types of processes they support. For

instance, an enterprise’s ITSM investments are largely established to support ITIL processes and

to achieve IT operational excellence with a very limited viewpoint of future state strategic

information or processes.

Figure 1

The IT Management Ecosystem

The collection of the information found in this eco-system represents the “Enterprise Portfolio”

which we will discuss further in the next section. It’s also worth noting that for most

STRATEGIC INFORMATION

OPERATIONAL INFORMATION

RU

N T

HE

BU

SIN

ESS

CH

AN

GE TH

E BU

SINESS

FinancialManagement

EA ModelingProject

and PortfolioManagement

BPM

Data Management

ALM

ITSM

GRC

White Paper

7 CONFIDENTIAL

Enterprises this IT Management ecosystem requires multiple venders, each providing best of

breed solutions and processes.

Enterprises have invested in their current IT management systems to support a wide variety of

IT processes. Today most of these processes are silo-ed within a particular system, but in fact if

we step back and take a “big picture” view of these processes it is possible to identify a set of

interacting planning value chains that span IT in its entirety. These BTM value chains can be

characterized into four fundamental planning processes as shown in Figure 2.

1. Business and IT Planning: The process of business and IT strategic planning and

roadmapping.

2. IT Portfolio Governance: The processes of managing the risk, health, standards and

compliance of the IT assets such as infrastructure, applications, and services.

3. IT Demand to Delivery: The process of managing business demand , funding, solution

architecture, governance, and delivery.

4. IT Financial Management: The processes of IT financial budgeting, measurement,

reporting, and forecasting.

Figure 2

The BTM Value Chains

Business and IT strategic planning and roadmapping

Business & IT Planning

IT Portfolio Governance

Risk, health, standards and compliance management

IT Demand to Delivery

Business demand , funding, solution architecture and delivery

IT Financial Management

IT financial budgeting, measurement, reporting, and forecasting

White Paper

8 CONFIDENTIAL

These value chains do not exist independently, but instead create a value network through their

interactions. Figure 3 depicts an example showing how they interact. In this case a new

business need identified in the Business/IT planning value chain drives budget needs in the IT

Financial Management value chain resulting in a new program request in the Demand to

Delivery value chain that needs to be coordinated with investment needs (for example an

application modernization need) coming from the IT Portfolio Management value chain.

Figure 3

The BTM Value Network

As can be seen, the BTM space is comprised of a broad set of rich information sources and a

number of interacting value chains and processes that are each dependent on the other. It is

clearly a complex system and due to that complexity it can be chaotic and subject to the “IT

butterfly effect” where small changes in the environment can have unexpected and potentially

disastrous results.

IT Portfolio Management

Portfolio

Stewardship

Assess risks, opportunities

Plan to improve

Measure and Communicate

IT Demand Management

Capture Demands

Evaluate ExecuteMeasure and Communicate

IT Financial Management

Budgeting Allocation Reporting Forecasting

Business/IT PlanningManage Business Context

Assess GapsManage Plan

of ActionMeasure and

Align.

White Paper

9 CONFIDENTIAL

The Journey to BTM

The promise of BTM is to seamlessly automate the collection of IT value chains by leveraging

information found across the multi-vender IT management ecosystem. Given the complexity,

mission criticality, multi-vender and evolving nature of the IT eco-system, it’s unlikely any single

vender can deliver BTM in totality. That said, we at Troux have a single focus to help our

customers improve their BTM programs by providing out of the box analytics that span their

multi-vender eco-system and inform the IT value chains. To that end we approach the

challenge by integrating the IT eco-system into what we call the Enterprise Portfolio which

represents the dynamic, centralized repository that a true BTM solution requires (see Figure 4).

The complexity of the relationships between these systems is represented leveraging Enterprise

Architecture foundations. Furthermore both current and future states are represented.

White Paper

10 CONFIDENTIAL

The Enterprise Portfolio

An Enterprise Portfolio contains descriptions of all assets, both tangible and intangible, for

which IT is responsible and their relationships, not only to each other, but to the Business as

well. In addition to current state information, future state roadmaps are represented.

Figure 4

The Enterprise Portfolio

The assets for which IT has stewardship responsibilities can be broken down into the following

four portfolios:

Application portfolio: Applications are the touch point between the Business and IT.

The applications represent a substantial IT asset that requires continuous ongoing

management. Ultimately the Application portfolio collectively becomes in itself a

Troux 9 Business Technology Management Platform

Business Goals & Strategy

Business Architecture

Applications

TechnologyInformation

Projects

Enterprise Portfolio Management

White Paper

11 CONFIDENTIAL

sustainable asset with many stakeholders, leveraged for many use cases and periodically

referenced by almost everyone in the enterprise.

Project portfolio: Program and Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is a mature

capability practiced by many leading Enterprises today. Also referred to as Demand

Management, it’s the process by which Business stakeholders make decisions about

investment funding and execution of a change to the current IT or business operations.

When combined with an Enterprise Portfolio perspective, better decisions are enabled

across the entire portfolio of projects.

Technology portfolio: The Technology portfolio represents all the “hard” or “Physical” IT

assets the Enterprise has invested in. In addition it also contains the catalog of all

technology standards, their status in the Enterprise (approved, denied, etc.) and the

roadmap for each catagory item.

Information portfolio: The Information assets are critical in identifying information risks

and how existing data can be leveraged within the enterprise. Pro-actively managing

Information assets and their policy status such as sensitivity rankings helps keep those

assets under proper control. Using a portfolio approach to the management and policy

classification of information assets provides a comprehensive understanding of what

common information assets exist and how they relate to other portfolios, most notably

the Business and Applications.

Additionally, an Enterprise Portfolio will contain descriptions of the Business which can be

represented in two additional portfolios:

Business Strategy portfolio which captures all the intangible aspects that drive the

Business decisions going forward. This critical portfolio, referred to by Gartner as

“Business Context”2 , contains all the external drivers, strategies, requirements,

principles, goals and objectives affecting the Enterprise as a whole.

Business Architecture portfolio which describes the Business capabilities, processes,

products and organization

2 Gartner, “EA Must Include Defining Your Enterprise Context”, Publication Date: 2 March 2011 ID Number:

G00209976

White Paper

12 CONFIDENTIAL

Capturing and managing these business-oriented portfolios is a critical component in providing

visibility into the business alignment of the IT portfolios and investments. It is these elements,

the Business viewpoint, that enable a movement from an “IT Portfolio” view to a full

“Enterprise Portfolio” view.

For a different perspective on why the integrated multi-portfolio approach is important, the

reader is referred to the Appendix at the end of this document.

Much of the information that describes the IT portfolios exists today in repositories that

support IT processes such ITIL, ALM and PPM. As previously stated, the promise of BTM is to

integrate these silo-ed processes. The first step in this integration is the aggregation of the

various planning repositories into an Enterprise Portfolio.

As previously mentioned, Figure 1 is a representation of the various existing sources of

information about the IT portfolio. Each of these repositories is the authoritative source for

one aspect of the Enterprise Portfolio, but none are well suited as the Enterprise Portfolio

because they are purpose built to support well established critical processes such as Change

Management or Project Management.

As shown in Figure 5, what is required is an integration approach that aggregates information

from each repository and then enriches that information --- using enterprise architecture

foundations --- to describe relationships between the portfolios. Additionally, many of these IT

planning systems are solely focused on the current operational state, so, future plans or

roadmaps need to be defined for each portfolio so that effective planning can be accomplished

across multiple portfolios.

White Paper

13 CONFIDENTIAL

Furthermore, in order to manage and govern the information in the Enterprise Portfolio,

ongoing stewardship and governance has to be established and automated, via workflows, for

each portfolio, addressing data quality, currency and completeness criteria that can be trusted.

Lastly, integrations with other sources of record must be automated to the extent possible to

insure currency as a onetime “import” is insufficient to support on going the decision support

needs.

Figure 5

Enterprise Architecture Integrates Silos of Information

BPM

ProcessAnalysis

ProcessDesign

EnterpriseArchitecture

ProcessSimulation

ProcessExecution

ProcessMonitoring

Future StateArchitecture

Roadmaps

Governance

BusinessStrategy

Scenarios

PPM

TimeTracking

DemandManagement

ProjectPlanning

Investment Planning Projects

Costing

CMDB

IncidentManagement

Service LevelManagement

ChangeManagement

ConfigurationManagement

Current StateArchitecture

AvailabilityManagement

Applications

ResourceManagement

Standards

White Paper

14 CONFIDENTIAL

The Enterprise Portfolio is Critical to High Priority

Initiatives

When Troux is established as the Enterprise Portfolio, a number of critical new use cases are

unlocked enabling cross portfolio planning in support of BTM the vision (see Figure 6).

Figure 6

Troux Delivers the Enterprise Portfolio

To that end it is useful to move beyond the theory of an Enterprise Portfolio and better

understand how it would be used in delivering supporting high priority BTM initiatives. It is also

important to note that an Enterprise Portfolio cannot by itself deliver BTM, but rather it can

deliver critical analytics that improve the planning and decision making across all IT portfolios

and processes. The examples that follow are just a few of the numerous high value use cases

an Enterprise Portfolio approach to BTM enables.

STRATEGIC INFORMATION

OPERATIONAL INFORMATION

RU

N T

HE

BU

SIN

ESS

CH

AN

GE TH

E BU

SINESS

FinancialManagement

EA Modeling

Project and PortfolioManagement

Business Process Management

MDM

ALM

ITSM

Asset Mgmnt

Enterprise Portfolio

Management(Troux)

White Paper

15 CONFIDENTIAL

Application Portfolio Management

IT organizations are under constant pressure to better align to the business, optimize resource

usage, identify and redirect wasted spending, improve compliance, and increase agility. In

many organizations basic application maintenance expenditures account for over 80% of annual

budgets so finding efficiencies in the application portfolio can yield significant benefits.

Since the application portfolio is the touch point with the business it is essential that an

Application Portfolio Management program is a sustainable and continuous. It has a large

audience of users and is foundational to a large number of use cases beyond cost saving

including compliance, impact analysis, risk management, modernization, and investment

planning. What IT and business needs is complete visibility into the application portfolio with

detailed understanding of the upstream dependencies (business processes, functions and

strategies) and downstream dependencies (infrastructure, software, servers) of applications,

services and projects. IT organizations need the appropriate capabilities to effectively

communicate cost-optimization efforts, change impact, risk management plans and secure buy-

in from business partners as well as provide real-time reporting on the application portfolio

risk, health, compliance and alignment.

Troux solutions enables businesses to analyze and gain insight into how best to manage and

optimize the Application Portfolio through the understanding of the of the entire enterprise

portfolio. Troux provides an integrated and automated out-of-the-box application for

application portfolio management

M&A

Executing a M&A transaction requires companies to understand business, operational and IT

ramifications of consolidation and integration. In addition, acquiring or merging with another

enterprise requires understanding of how new portfolios align to business goals and strategies.

White Paper

16 CONFIDENTIAL

How those portfolios create new or enhancing existing business capabilities is key to a

successful M&A event.

IT infrastructures are not always assessed during the formative stages of a M&A project. This

can lead to serious business and technology misalignments when integrating two organizations.

. The key to successful acquisitions is to develop a successful integration plan that

accommodates business, operational and IT aspects.

Troux solutions allow enterprises to assess these potential pitfalls and help align the

organization's strategies, operating models, and IT assets, – ultimately helping the enterprise

gain a business- centric view of the necessary IT transformations by considering the entire

enterprise portfolio within context of the acquisition or merger.

Cloud Planning

The cloud creates opportunities for IT and business --- improvements in agility, efficiency, cost

and simplification. Every enterprise needs to look at cloud transformation initiatives to not only

understand the business benefit and operation differentiation they can provide, but t also

understand the ramifications and implications to the business of making such a transformation.

In answering the question “what and how to move to the cloud” IT organizations have a

number of facets they needs to assess including multiple deployment options, project and

budget risk, security risks, elasticity of demand, regulatory implications, SLA’s and audit

challenges and finally the expected ROI of the various cloud transformation initiatives.

Troux solutions allow enterprises to understand their enterprise portfolios, to identify and

assess application candidates for migration to a cloud environment within the context of

technology risk, application suitability, security considerations and alignment to business goals

and strategies. By understanding the cloud opportunity through the lens of all the affected

enterprise portfolios, businesses can build better cloud transformation initiatives.

White Paper

17 CONFIDENTIAL

Investment Management

Large enterprises are faced with an ever increasing array of investment demands. To make

effective, impactful decision about which investments to pursue and which to reject requires a

deep understanding of those investment proposals within the context of the overall enterprise

portfolio.

Investments and program proposals need to be evaluated as part of the business and IT

planning process. To make the right decision, executives need to understand the alignment of

the potential investment landscape to the strategic goals and intent of the business. For

example, a proposed investment in application modernization or cloud transformation needs to

be evaluated with respect to the impacted enterprise goals, strategies and business capabilities

together with an understanding of existing application and technology roadmaps.

Troux solutions allow enterprises to assess investment and program proposals using a business-

centric view of the impacts and align these proposals to business goals and business

capabilities. New understanding of the investment with respect to the impact on the

Application, Technology, Process and Information Portfolios is gained.

Solution Architecture

Delivering on time and on budget is always a top CIO priority and CIOs need to make best use of

scarce project funding. Key to delivering projects on time that meet the business need is

excellent solution architecture. Solution architecture is an architectural abstraction of an end-

to-end solution consisting of applications, information and technology to support specific

business capabilities and business strategies. Without insight to the enterprise portfolio it is

problematic to design a successful solution architecture.

Solution Architecture must understand the current state the new solution will integrate with

and leverage opportunities for re-use in the current portfolio. Additionally, solution

White Paper

18 CONFIDENTIAL

architectures must adhere to the published catalog of technology standards and patterns and

architecture governance boards will use these catalogs to govern project compliance. Good

solution architectures inform deployment teams so they can better understand how the

solution fits into the enterprise, how it integrates with other aspects of the IT portfolio and how

it supports the business.

Troux offers a purposed product based on The Open Group’s TOGAF approach to enterprise

architecture that supports the full TOGAF ADM insuring that solution architectures address all

aspects of the enterprise portfolio.

Change Management

Most CMDB/ITSM systems implement data models that represent elements of the business

architecture such as CI owners and the business processes supported. In practice however, this

information is not populated because it is not the remit of the Operations teams to manage this

type of information. Hence it is difficult for operation change teams to understand risks and

business impacts of change requests.

As the business becomes more and more dependent on IT to run all business processes the

direct impact to the business of SLA failures becomes more and more acute. Better

understanding of impacted business capabilities and organizations improves the operations

team’s ability to mitigate risk and improve SLA’s.

Troux provides integrations with leading ITSM products. These integrations allow business

architecture portfolios to augment the ITSM tools being used by the operations teams. By

providing the ITSM tools with access to the enterprise portfolio, the business architecture can

be automatically provisioned to the ITSM tools enabling Change Teams to better manage

change impacts and improve SLA’s.

White Paper

19 CONFIDENTIAL

The Troux Approach

Troux provides industry leading software that delivers rapid and continuous value by utilizing an

Enterprise Portfolio approach to BTM, By leveraging out of the box analytics that give insight

into the interconnected nature of the Enterprise Portfolio Troux’s solution delivers rapid and

sustainable business value. (see Figure 4).

Additionally, Troux also provides a prescriptive approach to ensure customer success and on-

going customer self sufficiency. These “Troux Accelerators” are based on an “outside in”

approach that focuses on answering a set of business critical questions that are aligned to

Troux’s rich set of out of the box analytics (see Figure 7).

White Paper

20 CONFIDENTIAL

Figure 7

Troux’s Outside in Approach

Based on years of experience working with hundreds of customers, Troux Accelerators deliver a

structured, yet agile approach to help you align and synchronize your BTM program to realize

better execution, control risk, and improve financial performance.

Troux Accelerators are a proven prescriptive set of best practices, designed to deliver

immediate value by answering critical business questions, and packaged so your BTM program

provides your decision makers and stakeholders with rich information and analytics. As a result,

you can operationalize Program Management, Stewardship, and Governance.

The APM accelerator is based on a four step program (see Figure 8)

1. The Success Planning Phase – establishes the foundation for success; defining the vision,

goals, targeted value, & stakeholder priorities; level-setting the team, and setting the

course forward

RISK

MANAGEMENT& SECURITY

ALIGNINGBUSINESS AND IT

AGILITY &

INNOVATION

How do I rapidly estimate costs of

change

What are the impacts of change?

What are my

transformation plans and options?

UNDERSTANDING THE ENTERPRISE

Where are technology risks

associated with roadmap?

What technology

is about to go out of support?

What technology risk does my business have?

What are IT’s plans to mitigate risks?

What information is used by

what business processes?What are the

dependencies?

How good is my data and how do I improve it?

How are my costs

management plans performing?

How do my run and change the business

costs compare?

Where are the candidates for taking cost out?

REDUCING THE COST OF IT

What are the

business and IT plans? What is the IT landscape

by business area?

How is IT supporting the business?

White Paper

21 CONFIDENTIAL

2. The Data Quality Phase – operationalizes data stewardship; enabling domain stewards

through best practices to keep key data current, correct, & complete.

3. The Information Analysis Phase – identifies opportunities; executing key analytics and

examining the results for trends and anomalies that illuminate possible change

opportunities for consideration

4. The Business value Phase – makes decisions; using the results of analyses in governance

body actions & investment planning processes.

Figure 8

Troux Accelerator Methodology

Troux recognizes that one size doesn’t fit all and you need to size your approach to you

objectives and business imperatives. To that end, Troux offers three categories of Accelerators

to meet your needs and budgets:

1. Quick Start Accelerator - Quickly populate a targeted set of out-of-the-box Troux

analytics with the data required to get immediate value from your Troux software.

Typically time boxed to 2 months.

2. Rapid Answers Accelerator - Provide analytics for a high priority, near-term need within

an APM program --- typically within 3 months.

White Paper

22 CONFIDENTIAL

3. Program Accelerator - Establish an APM program that is operationalized and sustained

through Program Management, Stewardship, and Governance, providing a set of

analytics to communicate information centered on one or more functional areas. ---

Typically in 4 months. The program accelerator can be implemented on previously

executed Rapid Answers or Quick Start Accelerators

White Paper

23 CONFIDENTIAL

Appendix: A Parable that Enlightens

There is an ancient parable that originated in India about the blind men and an elephant. Each

blind man is given a chance to feel a different part of an elephant and describe what an

elephant is like. One man who handles the trunk says it is like a snake, another who feels the

tusk says it is like a spear, another who touches the tail says it is like a rope etc. They violently

disagree about what the elephant is, with no resolution to the debate.

The Enterprise Portfolio is much like the elephant in this story. If we don’t see it in its totality

including the Business viewpoint we cannot understand how all the parts make a whole

enterprise. Furthermore we risk endless debates that result in no business value.

For example, if we are looking to make decisions about the Application portfolio and are only

analyzing projects and applications, we are overlooking four additional domains (Business

Strategy, Business Architecture, Technology and Information). Without analytics that consider

all dimensions of the problem space it is highly unlikely the right application decisions will be

taken --- and in fact much like the blind men and the elephant --- there can be much

disagreement and little business value delivered.