MANAGING IT SERVICE PORTFOLIOS
How CIOs Can Align IT Service Delivery with the Business, Moving from Cost Center to Orchestrator
Introduction
The economy is hurting. At the time of writing, people had stopped worrying about using the “R” word—recession—and started fearing the “D” word—depression. Many businesses are now desperately looking for every cost savings they can find to help them survive the hard times.
CIOs are under intense pressure to justify the value of the services they provide. IT departments must do a much better job of aligning their resources and activities with business objectives, while ensuring that IT cost management is highly visible and explicit.
Complicating this situation, business units increasingly have a stronger voice in selecting the IT capabilities they use, whether sourced internally or externally. Business units are increasingly turning to third-party logistics providers (3PL), software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers or business process outsourcers (BPO), since their capabilities require little IT department involvement and can be funded through operating budgets.
Whether the business units source IT internally or externally, they demand that the costs they bear be transparent and that those costs be accounted for and aligned to funded business initiatives. IT services that are unable to find the safe harbor this alignment provides are the first on the chopping block when the next round of cost cutting begins.
These IT cost management factors have serious implications for business service portfolios and the IT resources that support the services within those portfolios. This white paper examines these issues and offers solutions to some of the challenges involved in IT cost management.
The topics included in this whitepaper are:
- Issues Driving the Need for Service Portfolio Management
- Service Portfolio Management Solutions
