CIS 350 – Strategic information systems |
IT Portfolio Management |
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IT Portfolio Management
Making the right investment in IT at the right time to match your business needs is a delicate balance between maximizing the return on your investment, and avoiding risks. My current place of employment has a hard time making this decision. This is because my company do not want to invest too early with the long payback but delaying investments can sometimes result in increased risk as a result of being forced to undertake large, high risk projects. This is a challenge for business managers and executives (Vaughan, 2006). The person making the decisions has to able to identify the trends or triggers to be able to make the right decision at the right time. This can be achieved through IT Portfolio Management. IT Portfolio Management process is a method of rationalizing an organization’s suite of IT applications to meet business needs, according to Andrew Makar of Tactical Project Mangement.
There are elements of IT portfolio management that exists in all companies. Most of these companies have similar goals and objectives. Which are maximizing value while managing risks and costs. These values can be tangible and intangible. A lot of the companies utilize simple, straightforward financial models to make investment decisions (Maizlish, 2007). Here at the Institute for Public Health and Medicine, we can be placed in the straightforward financial model. For these companies the IT portfolio management framework is incomplete. The framework is considered incomplete because it missing key criteria, uniformly and is not applied across the entire organization nor over the entire life cycle of an IT investment. The framework contains information about each portfolio and the investments that comprise each portfolio, while highlighting both the positive and negative aspects of these investments (Maizlish, 2007). Analysis can be conducted to identify...