IT Portfolio Management: Asset Classes and Portfolios

Multi-order Interconnections of Assets

Comments from yesterday’s post regarding the difference between IT Assets and Traditional Investment Assets I had a tendency to agree with in the past. However, since the changes in law and the economy the independence between assets no longer exists as once was believed. As the most recent financial meltdown the economy is still recovering from demonstrates. This phenomena of interconnectedness pointed out in Albert-László Barabási’s book “Linked” points to the fact that everything is connected. The issue becomes how these are connected and the depth of the effects of that connection. This is the area of systems dynamics which I continue to study at the Center for Understanding Change. My objective is understand the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. levels of consequence to the ever widening web of connection we live in and how to apply it to ITSM and Enterprise as a whole.

Applying these concepts to IT Portfolio Management the relationships between the traditional assets classes under management became first a hierarchy and second not much to my surprise like the taxonomy originally developed for the conceptual underpinning Has Witt and I discussed for Active Directory. This hierarchy points to ITSM (Services) as the bridge between Enterprise concerns and IT Functional concerns. It is the IT Services which enable the enterprise capabilities which at the corporate level are the assets.

Accounting for temporal relationships

Below is the initial brainstorming of the hierarchy and its relationship to both enterprise and time. The time dimension in most portfolio management methodologies is limited to the time value of money typically in the form of NPV. However, not accounting for the effects of time on the various attributes under consideration for the enterprise is where I see the limits to using time in present portfolio management methodologies. A White Paper, still under development, “The Optimum Path to an Uncertain Destination” is one approach I’ve found to address this situation and is included in the Modern IT Portfolio Management methodology I’ve been creating.