UMT360 Blog
Blog Posts from the Leader in Enterprise Portfolio Management
For the seventh consecutive year, UMT360 is once again recognized as a Visionary in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Integrated IT Portfolio Analysis Applications (IIPA). In its 2018 report, Gartner recognizes UMT360 for its completeness of vision and ability to execute. The full report can be found here (Gartner subscription required).
UMT360 has once again been recognized as a Visionary in Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for Integrated IT Portfolio Analysis Applications (IIPA). This is the sixth consecutive year that UMT360 has been recognized by Gartner for its completeness of vision and ability to execute. The full report can be found here (Gartner subscription required).
UMT360 today announced the release of the newest module in its leading Enterprise Portfolio Management solution – UMT360 Portfolios. UMT360 Portfolios connects siloed portfolios (e.g. project, application, IT Service and business capability) to build a dynamic blueprint of a company’s operating fabric. It provides three breakthrough EPM models to help CIOs, Portfolio Managers and PMOs visualize cross-portfolio relationships and gain the transparency needed to digitalize investments. Click here to read the press release and here for more information on UMT360 Portfolios and UMT360 Financials.
Gartner’s recently released 2014 CEO and Senior Executives Survey found that growth and IT are executive’s top priorities and those surveyed are talking about digital. In Gartner’s announcement of the survey, VP and Gartner Fellow Mark Raskino said the CEO’s who say technology-related change is important to them, must now invest in that insight. “Make the tough choices. Be prepared to cut back in areas that represent the old pre-digital ways of doing business. But maintain a coherent and integrated view of the investment being made. Don’t allow too much fragmentation across sales, marketing, digital, IT and other budgets to obscure the view and reduce directional control.”
In Gartner’s recently released 2014 CEO and Senior Executive Survey, a third of the executives surveyed named growth as their top priority. Businesses want growth but face a series of challenges when it comes to finding ways to paying for it. Among other things, the run-the-business investments are eroding capacity, consuming funds needed for growth, so the business has to find a way to rationalize the operational spend. As a result, organizations are taking a hard look at their Application Portfolio Management (APM) to determine what they need to do to make it more effective.
An important part of Application Portfolio Management (APM) is creating a strong inventory of information and leveraging powerful business intelligence and analytic capabilities to help identify transformation alternatives and make decisions in terms of which applications to maintain, invest in, enhance or retire. A comprehensive analysis will help identify under-performing applications, redundancies within the portfolio and highlight applications which may be costly and a poor fit.
Businesses today are challenged with ways to fund innovation as budgets remain flat or increase incrementally. The inability to efficiently invest in the future is one of the reason’s IT is becoming less relevant. It’s imperative that organizations make changes and not only gain a greater understanding of their spending dynamics but also adopt a new approach to decision making, one that focuses on strategic investments and their ability to create competitive advantage. How do you get started?
Today, more than a third of IT budgets are consumed by applications with half of that dedicated to maintaining legacy systems which, in so many cases, don’t align with current business needs. As a result, executives are turning to Application Portfolio Management (APM) to rationalize their operational costs, modernize their applications and better align with business priorities and needs. In a webinar now available on-demand, UMT360’s Ben Chamberlain demonstrates how UMT360’s APM is helping businesses get more business value from their application portfolios.
Click here to view the complimentary webinar on Application Portfolio Management and for more information about UMT360, contact us today.
Mike Gruia, UMT360
With pressure to do more with less, IT leaders are turning to Application Portfolio Management (APM) to help them rationalize the operational costs so they can allocate more funds toward innovation. APM is also helping them modernize their portfolios so they have the agility needed to successfully meet changing business demands.
Recently, UMT360 CEO Mike Gruia discussed in an APM webinar, 3 Breakthrough Models being used by APM Top Performers. Mike stressed the importance of finding more effective ways to manage applications which currently consume a major portion of an organization’s IT budget. Top performers are able to apply the three models to make smarter investment decisions.
Webinar Poll Results: When asked about the most important APM success attributes, 63% of webinar attendees said integration tops their list. 55% of attendees said APM concepts will benefit them most in strategy and rationalization with 28% saying their benefit will be primarily in cost reduction.
Learn more about how to get started implementing Application Portfolio Management. Click here to view Mike’s presentation on-demand.
As we ring in 2014, IT spending is on its way up. Gartner is forecasting a 3.1% increase in worldwide IT spending this year taking it to an estimated $3.8 trillion. Also on the rise, the amount of software budgets dedicated to applications. In a Gartner enterprise IT spending study last year, respondents indicated the largest portion of their software budgets, 36%, is focused on enterprise application software; 33% of the budget goes to infrastructure software; and 31% to vertical industry-specific applications. The increase in funds dedicated to enterprise application software is necessary largely due to organizations working with outdated application systems. In most mature markets, those systems are more than a decade old and replacement of the antiquated technology is critical to remaining competitive.
This is a good time to review your own 2014 application spend asking yourself whether your budget as currently written will be able to help you achieve your business goals and new business needs among the ever changing market conditions. As well, how will the move to the cloud impact your spending? Gartner reported last year that only 38% of organizations they surveyed were using cloud services, yet 80% of respondents indicated they would be using cloud services over the next year so certainly the cloud will have a strong impact on spending in 2014.
Here are some recommendations and thoughts we share with our own customers as they step into Q1 – subjects we’ll be discussing more throughout 2014:
UMT360 are the experts in Enterprise Portfolio Management consulting services and solutions. Our proven methodology provides PMO, IT, business and finance leaders with the critical business planning and controls needed to improve their decision making and transform how they manage enterprise investments. Leveraging our industry leading expertise and technology along with Microsoft’s PPM platform, we help organizations at every level of maturity gain the visibility, insight and enterprise perspective they need to align execution with strategy across all project, program, product, IT asset and capability portfolios. A multi-year winner of Microsoft’s Partner of the Year for PPM, the company has been named a Gartner Cool Vendor in Program and Portfolio Management and is consistently recognized as a Visionary in the Gartner Integrated IT Portfolio Analysis Magic Quadrant.
