Some of you will be familiar with the term Portfolio Management, often it’s applied outside of IT and in the business for Finance (Asset Portfolio) or even Product portfolio Management and Project Portfolio Management (inside and outside of IT). Well in the ITIL v3 glossary we can find the term Service Portfolio Management (SPM). Now this is where you store the full lifecycle of a service, from inception of an idea, through Scoping, designing, building, testing, approving, releasing and retiring. Though once released it becomes part of the Service Catalogue, which holds approved and live services. The catalogue could be seen as a sub-set of the Service Portfolio. The SPM providing much more visibility into the costs, resources and plans about to “hit” live operations, not to mention providing the CIO with a better picture of where his spend and resources are going. Provide a view of this through a “dashboard” and it makes it easy see and manage IT projects and how they relate to Business Projects.

So let’s take this a step further in our aim to continually improve best practices, and think more about the integration of IT with the Business, not just alignment. So what happens if we bring together the Service Portfolio, the Application Portfolio and the Project Portfolio information into a consolidated view using “C” level management dashboards? You begin to show real value to the board. They can see where the spend is going, where the resources are and being bottlenecked, and then they get a better feel of the “health” of the business. Now this is all at a level above mere day to day live operations, which should have their own dashboards, and should now be about managing utility. Add these two views together and you have the business view.

This is what is now being talked about as Integrated IT ( IIT), moving up the value chain from Business Alignment and into Business Integration. My view is that this is great news. This is moving towards Business thinking and IT fully enabling and supporting the Business. Isn't that what IT is supposed to do anyway? Now this is being even further supported by ISACA, custodians of CobiT, and also Val-IT. Within Val-IT we have 3 main areas for the boardroom to watch:

Value Governance, incorporating,

• The establishment of informed and committed leadership
• The definition and implementation of a value governance framework and work processes
• The definition of portfolio characteristics
• The alignment and integration of vale management with enterprise financial planning
• The establishment of effective governance monitoring
• Continuous improvement of value management practices

Portfolio Management

• The establishment of strategic direction and a target investment mix
• The determination of the availability and sources of funds
• Managing the availability of human resources
• The evaluation and selection of programs to fund
• Monitoring and reporting on investment portfolio performance
• Optimisation of investment portfolio performance

Investment Management

• The development and evaluation of the initial business case
• An understanding of the program and implementation options
• The development of a program plan
• The development of full cycle costs and benefits
• The development of a detailed business case
• The launch and management of the program
• Updating of the operational IT portfolio
• Updating of the business case
• Monitoring and reporting on the program
• Retirement of the program

After all it’s the responsibility of the board, the CEO and all executives to ensure that stakeholder and shareholder returns are optimised through appropriate use of all the resources and opportunities available. This responsibility includes IT-enabled investments and resources where the potential for significant value creation is great.

We need all these “portfolios” in place and integrated today if the business is to fully understand its position, and its direction both current and potential. Thankfully ITIL v3 is helping us get there, add to this CobiT and now Val-IT, and we have all the ingredients necessary to move forward with knowledge and understanding to build our solution and start making informed decisions.

Are we there yet? No. But in the next 5 years or less these things will come together. It just makes sense.