Portfolio Expert
The Perfect Storm
With the growing need for collaboration and portfolio management, you can expect to see a real push toward IT governance across development and deployment.
Complexity. It bedevils every stage of application development and has driven application lifecycle management (ALM) into the IT portfolio management arena.
Today, development managers must juggle requirements, change management, testing and deployment, as well as face tough compliance demands. Add to that stew the emergence of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Software as a Service (SaaS), and it creates a "perfect storm" of complexity for IT and development organizations.
That perfect storm is doing more than disrupting planning and management -- it's driving the sails of ALM. Regulatory-compliance initiatives provide funding and motivation to commit to software lifecycle management processes, automated tools adoption and, in some cases, IT program and portfolio management.
Don't underestimate the
role of distributed development in all this. Scattered programming teams demand interaction among far-flung colleagues and business stakeholders. Requirements documentation, iterative communication, automated software change, configuration management, and version control and testing -- all these rely on consistent automation. There's a lot to juggle, and ad hoc approaches fail miserably in these complex environments.
No surprise, SOA is a factor. Close business/IT collaboration is the phrase of the day for services creation. We're just beginning to see lifecycle tools that explicitly target
SOA testing and change management, but the services approach demands better communication and a bridging of the business-IT gap. SOA initiatives must reflect core business needs or risk failure.
This all comes back to development approaches, which must be iterative, managed and collaborative.
Sea Change?
It's hardly news that lifecycle initiatives are the stuff of G2000 organizations. Smaller dev shops have stayed away. The open source movement is changing that, driving adoption of development and lifecycle tools by a much broader base. At the same time, a community approach to development has emerged.
At its best, this approach revitalizes software quality and energizes developer creativity. Commercial software makers have tapped into this well, applying select open source practices in what is being called "open commercialization" -- that is, inviting users and customers to
help evolve and improve the code base. Successful open source initiatives for the development community range from IBM's Eclipse IDE and related lifecycle products to CollabNet's narrowly targeted Subversion for code-change management and version control. A side benefit: We are seeing innovative licensing models for tools adoption.
Adoption gets a kick from SaaS on hosted and shared infrastructure. These offerings sidestep implementation costs, shift complexity to the provider and allow developers to receive the benefit of automated tools more quickly. SaaS, combined with the open source model, has prompted large numbers of new users to adopt automated application lifecycle tools.
Feeding Frenzy
The response from the vendor community to all this? A feeding frenzy. Over the past three years, more than 10 IT Project Portfolio Management (IT PPM) tool companies have been acquired. In the past year alone, Microsoft acquired UMT (a sophisticated portfolio management product), HP announced its intent to acquire Mercury Interactive (which had previously acquired Kintana) and Serena acquired Pacific Edge. (Earlier acquisitions include CA/Niku, Compuware/Changepoint, IBM/System Corp., Borland/ Legadero, Telelogic/Focalpoint and others.)
Microsoft's announced strategy involves integration between Microsoft Project and UMT and longer-term leverage in conjunction with future releases of Visual Studio Team System. The benefits of coordinating IT PPM with ALM tools include metrics that allow qualitative analysis based on quantitative data. Stuff that was locked up within ALM testing and change management systems can be exposed.
A lot of useful metrics rise to the surface. Number of defects, performance benchmarks for internal and offshore personnel, and the quality of team response to problematic defects and urgent change requests all become visible. This helps IT organizations coordinate internal and dispersed development staff to meet shifting business needs. In short, the new tools deliver insight about which resources map best to which development tasks and projects.
In response to growing need for collaboration and portfolio management, you can expect to see a real
push toward IT governance across development and deployment. Automated tools are moving in that direction as well. The upshot? Over the next 12 to 36 months, application developers and planners should shift processes to plan more broadly across the entire
IT portfolio.
About the Author
Melinda-Carol Ballou is program director for IDC's Application Life-Cycle Management research, where she focuses on software life-cycle process configuration and management, software quality and IT governance software. Prior to joining IDC, she ran Ballou IT Strategies, an independent consulting company specializing in PPM and ALM, and served as senior program director at META Group.