IT Demand Management

What is IT demand management and why is it important?

IT demand management is the process of generating, requesting, screening, evaluating and selecting IT investments. It is comprised of the following five sub-processes:

• Ideation – Encourages and promotes innovation through the generation of ideas for new projects
• Intake – Enables stakeholders to request new projects, and provides the capability to process, track, and status the project requests through their lifecycle
• Screening – Ideas are screened for strategic fit, and those that pass the screening are expanded upon to become concepts
• Evaluation – Through the use of a lite business case, the costs and benefits of concepts are evaluated to determine which meet established thresholds and have the sufficient merit to proceed
• Prioritization – A capability that enables cross-functional teams to assess the business value of competing concepts, resulting in a ranking based on strategic alignment
• Selection – make decisions regarding the selection of projects and optimize the allocation of investment resources.

IT demand management is important because business executives recognize the need to manage their IT investments as an integral part of their business strategy. Whether the strategy is focused on growing top-line revenues through the introduction of new products or services, or reducing costs of shared services and infrastructure, an enterprise-level IT demand management process is critical to improving the bottom-line and succeeding in today’s competitive environment.

How does Definitive help facilitate this process?

IT demand management is, by its very nature, a team sport. As such, the process must promote teamwork.

Definitive’s role is to tailor and use specific components of our proven IT demand management methodology to bring process clarity to what we refer to as the “front of the funnel”. The methodology ensures:

• The team is commissioned and the team members are identified
• The initial operating guidelines are established, documented, and communicated
• The team meets regularly
• The portfolio goal and objectives are set
• The current IT portfolio is baselined
• All new ideas are screened and thinned
• All new concepts are prioritized using established processes and definitions

Using the organization’s strategic goals, Definitive will facilitate: the establishment and weighting of the selection criteria that will be used by the team; the review and evaluation of potential IT project investments; trade-off analyses; and the decision-making process to ensure that only high business value projects are selected.

Definitive will assist in the establishment of the processes required for the long-term, such as conducting IT budget reviews and quarterly portfolio reviews, where budgets, strategic alignment, portfolio mix and balance are reviewed.

Definitive also assists the customer by managing the business process, developing job aids and reports, and providing and maintaining the support tools, such as Definitive Pro™ and Microsoft SharePoint.

Collaboration

Definitive Pro™ enables the IT demand management team to collaborate anytime, anywhere, using any device. By making it easier to participate, we: bring together representatives from business, technology and finance; promote teamwork; and improve cross-functional insight.

Prioritization

Definitive Pro™ uses the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to accurately establish the relative importance of the selection criteria, and efficiently score all competing IT project investments. The consistent and transparent scoring process yields greater consensus and buy-in than other approaches.

Optimization

Definitive Pro™ employs the Gurobi optimizer®, a state-of-the-art mathematical programming solver for optimizing the allocation of resources. The Gurobi optimizer quickly identifies the set of IT project investments that maximize the strategic benefit, while satisfying all dependencies and constraints.

Faster and better decisions — Justifiable decision rationale — Historical record of decisions

Definitive Pro™ also powers group decision support for:

• Budget Formulation
• Business Opportunity Selections
• Business Partner Selections
• Merger & Acquisition Selections
• Organizational Cost Savings
• Personnel Selections
• Product and Feature Selections
• Requirements Prioritization
• Risk Assessments
• Strategic Investment Selections
• Strategy Development
• Surveys and Audience Response
• Vendor Selections