Two innovative vendors — alfabet and Primavera ProSight (formerly ProSight) — are providing support for project tracking and investment management. Ignoring these crucial concerns will result in ineffectual enterprise architecture (EA) and, at best, haphazard alignment between IT and the business strategy.

• The planningIT product from alfabet combines enterprise architecture capabilities with support for project planning and tracking. It has a number of innovative workflow and collaboration capabilities, as well as the ability to detect conflicts between projects and noncompliant projects.
• Primavera ProSight is an enterprise investment management tool that enables the application of portfolio management techniques to IT investment management. One attractive capability for enterprise architects is its ability to analyze an application portfolio, so it facilitates application portfolio rationalization.

Enterprise architects:

• Focus on all aspects of the activity cycle — strategize, architect, lead, govern and communicate.
• Consider the support for some of the key aspects of architecture governance provided by two innovative vendors — alfabet and Primavera ProSight.

Two key challenges for EA are, on the one hand, effectively working with projects to harmonize their plans and deliverables and, on the other hand, managing IT investments to optimize business outcomes, including the thinning down of application portfolios. Both of our featured vendors address aspects of these challenges, and thus add innovative capabilities to the enterprise architect's armory of tools.

Enterprise architecture is a relatively new discipline. While a number of vendors address the integration and presentation needs of EA, support for other aspects of the role, such as more sophisticated analyses and support for governance, is just starting to emerge.

Berlin, Germany (www.alfabet.de )

Analysis by Greta James

Why Cool: The planningIT product from alfabet combines EA capabilities with functions that support IT planning, project proposals and project tracking. Most products in the EA tool market have developed from either modeling tools or metadata repositories, thus planningIT provides a different and valuable perspective.

Innovative features of planningIT include its workflow and collaboration capabilities. Alerts can be triggered by a change of state of an object in the repository and used to notify stakeholders. Alerts can also be triggered by the absence of an event, such as a missed deadline. Other valuable features of planningIT include useful scenario-planning capabilities and a range of standard analyses and reports, which relate EA and projects:

• Recording and tracking project proposals, including the business case and project costs
• Documenting goals, which can then be associated with proposals and projects
• Assigning current-state architecture objects to project proposals, encouraging reuse and allowing conflicts to be detected
• Providing a project business case template, which supports common calculations such as discounted cash flows
• Managing architecture alternatives for a project, which is particularly useful in assessing applications for waivers from standards
• Displaying on a dashboard artifacts that make up a future-state architecture and indicating whether these are unchanged, new or to-be-retired
• Showing solution conflicts of conflicting dependencies between various proposed solutions

Challenges: alfabet is a small company based in Berlin, Germany. Its customers are primarily drawn from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, although it has recently extended its presence to other countries — including, significantly, the U.S. Expansion beyond its home base must be carefully managed so as to not overextend the company.

Who Should Care: The planningIT product provides the ability to link two strategic planning disciplines, EA and the enterprise program office. The practitioners of these two disciplines should review this approach. The product's value proposition should also be of interest to others in the enterprise who undertake IT strategic planning, including the CIO.

Related Research:

"Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture Tools, 1Q06"

"Eight Enterprise Architecture Tool Best Practices"

Portland, Oregon (www.prosight.com )

Analysis by Robert Handler

Why Cool: Primavera ProSight offers Portfolios, an enterprise investment management tool that enables the application of a portfolio management approach to investment management — for both IT and non-IT investments. Its offering enables a relatively straightforward mechanism to capture, structure and present complex data for easier decision making. While much of the focus of its offering is on project portfolio management, including its ability to address U.S. federal CPIC requirements, it also provides a solution for an epidemic problem facing most organizations — application portfolio bloat. Primavera ProSight provides both methods and functionality to capture and structure application portfolio data to facilitate application portfolio rationalization.

Furthermore, its project portfolio capabilities can be used to prevent application portfolio bloat from recurring. For the most progressive organizations, ProSight enables alignment of product and service investments with its corresponding investments in IT, which will ensure that organizations are making rational business investments in IT. As society continues to evolve as a network of interconnected nodes, portfolio management provides one of the few mechanisms for making rational business decisions because it's one of the few techniques that note dependencies between investments (that is, investment nodes on an investment network).

While many of the traditional project portfolio management tools are extensions of enterprise project management tools or professional service automation tools, Primavera ProSight is a stand-alone tool that enables the application of portfolio management to decision data that resides either within or outside of operational systems. Unlike a standard reporting tool, Primavera ProSight enables portfolio management analytics (for example, efficient frontier). It also provides a repository to maintain investment data that accounts for investment dependency. Primavera ProSight has open integration capabilities, so it can capture data at the source (for example, Microsoft Project, HP OpenView). This architecture allows the tool to evolve as the client's underlying operational processes and supporting infrastructure mature.

Challenges: Primavera ProSight is often compared to project and portfolio management tools. While it supports this space, it also supports IT asset portfolio management and non-IT investment management. Therefore, the overlap in market coverage may confuse the market. Primavera's recent acquisition of ProSight may also change the vision and direction of the offering. While presently Primavera ProSight is neutral when it comes to the sources of data it draws on, this may change according to Primavera's strategy; the acquiring firm largely supports enterprise project management. In addition, leadership changes, primarily among executives from ProSight, may disrupt the direction and market positioning of the Primavera ProSight Portfolios product.

Who Should Care: Anyone making investment decisions over a basket of goods and services should care about this vendor and its products. This includes chief marketing officers, CIOs, heads of program management offices and enterprise architects. Enterprise architects use ProSight to rationalize portfolios of IT assets, which include but are not limited to applications.

Related Research:

"Primavera Buys Tool Vendors for Portfolio and Risk Management"

"Project and Portfolio Management Applications: Perspective"

"Insurance Provider Embarks on Portfolio Rationalization"

"Magic Quadrant for IT Project and Portfolio Management Applications, 2006"