Maximize the Value of IT Across Enterprise Portfolios

Optimize digital portfolios across multiple product or service lines to maximize value for your organization.

Analyst Perspective

Use complex data effectively to drive better decision making.

At its core, effective digital portfolio management (DPM) is about data: collecting data, analyzing data and interpreting data to drive better business decisions. However, this is no small feat. Globally we produce roughly 2.5 quintillion (a quintillion is a 1 followed by 18 zeros) bytes of data per day, and a 2020 survey by IDC found that companies were only collecting about half of the data available to them and were using only 57% of what they collected (Seagate, 2020).

Digital portfolio management is about distilling complex data sets down to relevant and actionable insights that will allow you to make better business decisions and invest resources in the activities and assets that will drive the most value for your organization. It's not an easy task and there are many challenges along the path to implementing DPM at your organization, but it has the potential to radically transform how you manage your digital resources and drive operational efficiency and value creation across your enterprise.

Kim Osborne Rodriguez

Research Director, CIO Advisory
Info-Tech Research Group

Develop a holistic view of your enterprise IT portfolios across multiple product or service lines

Info-Tech Insight

Optimization often happens within, rather than across, siloes. Break down the barriers in order to optimize more effectively.

Defining digital portfolio management (DPM)

This research is for enterprise-level CIOs and CXOs who manage IT operations across multiple product and service lines.

Digital Portfolio Management:

A strategic approach to actively managing technology and digital resources across multiple product and service lines in order to maximize value at the enterprise level.

Digital portfolio management should be:

1. Strategic: Digital portfolio management approaches should always align with the strategy, goals and objectives of the business.
2. Active: this is an ongoing process, not something that happens once a year. Develop processes to support ongoing management of the digital portfolio investment mix.
3. Enterprise-level: this research is intended to be applied across multiple product or service lines which maintain separate digital/IT portfolios.

The Digital Umbrella

“Going digital” is about much more than strategy and a few new apps.

It requires a complete reinvention of how business and IT operate: integrated teams that deliver their products and services to their customers preferentially through technology.

Note: Many of these approaches combine strategic and tactical tools. Their placement on the graphic below is based on their overall approach.

Your challenge

Many organizations are skilled at optimizing within portfolios, not across them. Use this research to optimize at the enterprise level.

• This research is for organizations that have already optimized within their various IT portfolios (applications, projects, hardware, etc.) and are looking to take the next step of optimizing across portfolios.
• This is an exceedingly complex problem for even moderately sized organizations, and most organizations fail to get it right.
• Use data to make better decisions about your digital portfolio mix in order to direct investments to the areas which generate the most value for your organization.

This research will help CIOs and CXOs better understand the various digital and IT portfolios across multiple product and service lines, and optimize investments to maximize value.

"Organizations must invest their scarce resources in the right technology at the right time and ensure the right outcomes. At a small scale, this can be difficult but manageable. In large organizations traditional, siloed portfolio management approaches are no longer suitable."

– Cole Cioran, Managing Partner, Info-Tech Research Group

Most businesses don't use data effectively

We're producing more and more data, but it's not getting used

• Globally, we produce an estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, but a 2020 IDC survey of 1,500 business leaders indicated that businesses use only about a third of the data available to them (Seagate, 2020).
• Organizations today are larger and more complex than ever before, and digital capabilities have become a critical success factor in the global economy.
• Complexity has a cost; McKinsey & Company has found that organizations which reduce their complexity generally end up reducing costs too, some reporting up to 20% savings of their personnel costs.

The complex enterprise data problem:

56%

Businesses only collect 56% of the data available to them and use only 57% of the data they collect.

Source: IDC, 2020; n=1,500

80%

80% of organizations reduce their costs when they reduce complexity

Source: McKinsey & Company, 2010

Use the right organizing principles to define your digital portfolios

Categorize portfolios using a financial management approach

Portfolio Definitions:

• Resources: Money or time which can be invested in other portfolios to drive value. Includes financial resources and workforce capacity.
• Talent: The people, skills, knowledge and capabilities of your workforce. Includes employees, contractors, outsourced talent, and consultants.
• Activities: Actions which drive change within an organization. Includes projects, programs, initiatives, products, service desk, work orders.
• Assets: Tangible and intangible items which can be used to generate value. Includes applications, data, software, hardware, security, etc.

Info-Tech's methodology for digital portfolio management