 |
 |
 |
|
12.10.08 New ERP Framework For Product Lifecycle Management  By Charles Betz Frameworks, frameworks, everywhere... ITIL, CMM, COBIT, etc., etc., ... and yet none of them satisfy. All have nagging gaps and flaws: - ITIL's weakness with respect to production applications, the primary "service" offered by the modern IT organization... - CMM's level of abstraction and disregard for operations... - COBIT's narrow focus on governance and audit... And all are process based. They focus on activities, not on things. And while activities are indeed important, I have to confess my data centricity. I've always leaned a bit more to nouns than verbs. The concept of portfolio management is a better fit for me, and indeed ITIL calls for Service Portfolio Management, as an evolution of the original service catalog concept and co-optation of Application Portfolio Management. However, it is clear the Service Portfolio is one among several. And furthermore, the portfolio management literature does not focus enough on the fact that all elements in a portfolio go through a common lifecycle. In fact, that would be one of the defining characteristics of a portfolio: all elements in it go through largely the same stages from acquisition through disposition. Here is a candidate list of the lifecycles requiring portfolio management by the IT organization: some will be familiar, and some may surprise. • Service lifecycle management (from demand through retirement) • Technology product lifecycle management • Asset lifecycle management • Human resource lifecycle management • Information lifecycle management
I increasingly have been seeing these lifecycles as distinct yet interrelated; each has their own logic and none can be subsumed under another. In terms of the IT value chain, the essentials of the service lifecycle are primary, and the rest are supporting. But the supporting lifecycles are independent of the primary value chain in terms of timing and, often, initiating events. Definitions: Service lifecycle management is first among equals; without the need for services, none of the rest have any meaning. And, as I've established in previous writings, the service lifecycle is a value chain, the core of "ERP for IT" and essentially idenfical to ITIL v3. So, the concept of an "IT value chain" still has utility. The other lifecycles support it. Technology product lifecycle management. As a practicing enterprise architect, I am often called on to assist in the evaluation of new and novel products purporting to solve many problems. New products require functional and non-functional evaluation, definition of acceptable configurations, and ongoing control against policy and baseline configuration. Sets or "patterns" of product combinations may be defined, in the interest of greater consistency and provisioning speed. All products require upgrades and patches, are challenged by new competitors and disruptive forces, eventually lose vendor support, and ultimately must be euthanized and removed from the environment. This entire lifecycle is too often managed as a set of functional silos, even crossing multiple functions such as vendor, configuration, and security management. Note that this lifecycle is often decoupled from the service lifecycle. Technology products are often introduced with the assumption that they will support multiple services, and of course any one service may depend on multiple technology products. In the case of such fundamental computing platforms as OS/390, CICS, MQ, and TCP/IP, the technology product may well outlive multiple services platformed on it, themselves long-lived. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Charles Betz is a Senior Enterprise Architect, and chief architect for IT Service Management strategy for a US-based Fortune 50 enterprise. He is author of the forthcoming Architecture and Patterns for IT Service Management, Resource Planning, and Governance: Making Shoes for the Cobbler's Children (Morgan Kaufman/Elsevier, 2006, ISBN 0123705932). He is the sole author of the popular www.erp4it.com weblog. |
|
| ||||||||||||||||
 |
| -- ERPUpdate
is an iEntry, Inc. publication -- iEntry, Inc. 2549 Richmond Rd. Lexington KY, 40509 2008 iEntry, Inc. All Rights Reserved Privacy Policy Legal archives | advertising info | news headlines | free newsletters | comments/feedback | submit article |
