IT Portfolio Management Step-by-Step: Unlocking the Business Value of Technology

5.4. STAGE 3: CREATING

After the portfolio has been planned, you finally have the pleasure of building it. The moment you have been waiting for! It is at this point that you use that slicksilver bullet tool replete with collectors and agents to grab every modicum of data about all things IT, right? Wrong! Sure, this is the time when you collect data about the portfolio; however, there is a minor catch-22. Most of the pain points in IT are not cleanly structured to make data collection a breeze. Most of the time, target areas are identified for a reason. They are a mess.

Many of the tools on the market have collectors and agents. Some have built-in enterprise application integration (EAI) tools. While these are helpful, they are by no means silver bullets. Even if they were silver bullets with respect to the data they ollect, those data are suspect. IT organizations have a tendency to be the cobbler's stepchildren with regard to maintaining good-quality operational data. In fact, most successful IT portfolio management initiatives approach this stage with extreme pragmatism—the collected data are either readily accessible or reasonablyestimated and assessed in a rapid manner. Too much time spent collecting and analyzing the data can have rapidly diminishing returns. As mentioned previously, there must be a balance struck between being directionally accurate and precision.

The IT portfolio and subportfolio structures are to be populated with data and descriptors that will allow ...