Business Engine has announced the launch of the Alignment Engine, a major leap forward in portfolio optimisation and management applications.
IT and business stakeholders can now increase visibility into financial performance and ensure strategic alignment, while optimising the portfolio against budget and resource capacity constraints, creating a pragmatic portfolio that meets business goals.
Matt Light, research director and chair of Gartner Inc.'s project & portfolio management (PPM) research community, noted, "IT organisations that do not build a portfolio optimisation core competency together with business management are at risk. Strategic alignment, together with visibility into resource capacity and key projects, are basic needs for any business, including organisations looking to run the business of IT."
By providing a single, practical environment for IT stakeholders and IT managers to collaborate, Alignment Engine makes it easy to select, prioritise and analyse a realistic and "doable" portfolio of IT projects and initiatives against business objectives. As a result, multiple IT stakeholders can participate in the process, gain consensus and drive better business decisions. With Alignment Engine, a company can cut its decision-making cycle from three months to one month.
"Typically, the portfolio selection process is long, painful and subjective in many organisations," said Mark Strauch, COO of Business Engine. "Alignment Engine minimises the pain of reaching consensus - and alignment - on the IT portfolio. With a single tool, Business Engine provides an easy-to-use framework for IT and Business Units to quickly agree on the optimal mix of IT investments and initiatives."
Budgetary pressures, compliance mandates, and increased off-shoring have forced IT to better prioritise demand on one side, and more tightly manage the supply of resources on the other - whether those resources are money or people. In decentralised organisations, the demands from the business can frequently be in conflict, forcing IT to broker trade-off decisions in order to arrive at the best aggregate allocation of a scarce IT budget.
Created for Business Analysts, Portfolio Managers, Business Relationship Liaisons, and IT Managers, the Alignment Engine helps:
- Assign weighted scores against business strategy
- Determine the degree of business impact of new ideas and candidate projects
- Score, select and analyse portfolios, and compare each one against other "what if" scenarios
- Approve final portfolios via multi-step, multi-participant approval workflows
- Integrate with financial and operational processes to execute the portfolio
Alignment Engine's flexibility to adapt to the maturity level of the organisation allows for easily explainable results, backed by real time data, substantially enhancing credibility and accurate decision making.
Alignment Engine provides defined weighted strategic objectives and measurement criteria against which new ideas and existing programmes and projects can be evaluated.
Alignment Engine also provides business executives with a unique scoring system that determines how new business ideas can be supported by the existing IT budget, and ensures that existing projects remain in line with current objectives. Easy-to-use analytics allow portfolio managers to quickly create and evaluate alternative portfolio scenarios against risk, return on investment and strategic contribution. The result is a strategically aligned portfolio that balances supply and demand.
Key capabilities of the Alignment Engine include:
- Ability to evaluate new demand alongside work-in-process efforts
- Optimisation against true budget and resource capacity constraints
- Support for unique customer governance processes
- Consistency, accuracy and timeliness via single data source
- Support for annual alignment process and frequent realignments