Maintain and plan your IT architecture

Maintaining accurate data and gaining business insights from your data is fundamental to strategic IT portfolio management. The typical day-to-day tasks in Alfabet will be to capture and regularly maintain information about the assets in the IT architecture and use that information to make informed and strategic business decisions about your IT portfolio. Data quality scores and data completeness are measured along all stages of IT portfolio management so that you always know how reliable your data is and where information gaps need to be addressed.

The following describes a general sequence of user activities based on the user profiles used to access Alfabet.

NUMB_1 

Set up Alfabet and import data. This is the first set of activities that must be done before Alfabet can be productively used by the user community. Users with the Portfolio Admin user profile must create user accounts and user groups in Alfabet, configure relevant evaluation and reference data, and import initial data to the repository. Click for more information about the portfolio administrator's tasks.
NUMB_2 

Capture and maintain data. After data is initially imported, users typically continue with data capture activities. This might include adding more information to the data that has been imported as well as adding new data to the repository. Your user profile determines what kind of data you can capture and maintain:

  • Application Manager: This user profile allows users to capture applications and manage application lifecycles . Users with this user profile can also specify how the applications support the business architecture and exchange business data . These users can also specify which components the application uses. Data about business capabilities and organizations should already be in the repository in order to describe how the application supports the business.

    Click for more information about the application manager's tasks.

  • Technology Manager: This user profile allows users to capture components and manage their lifecycles. Click to understand the tasks relevant for the Technology Manager user profile.
  • Portfolio Manager: This user profile allows users to capture and maintain data for applications, components, and any other asset information that they have access permissions for. For example, this may include capturing data about the business, application, information, and technology architectures as well as the projects that are relevant to the IT portfolio. The portfolio manager has constant insight regarding the quality of the data and can initiate activities to ensure that the data is kept up-to-date.

    Click for more details about the portfolio manager's tasks.
NUMB_3 

Analyze the IT portfolio with out-of-the-box business questions. Users with the user profiles Portfolio Manager and Portfolio Analyst have access to all business questions and analytics in Alfabet. Business questions are grouped to provide insight about the governance and responsibility of IT assets, transparency regarding architecture and costs, rationalization candidates, roadmapping the target architecture, potential IT risks to the business, cloud migration candidates. Data quality reports are at-hand for every business question so that users understand how reliable the data is. With the Portfolio Manager user profile, users have read-write permissions to the assets they are authorized to change and can improve the data on the spot.