Communications of the ACM

Communications of the ACM

Integrated It Management Tool Kit

By Mordechai Ben-Menachem, Roy Gelbard
Communications of the ACM, April 2002, Vol. 45 No. 4, Pages 96-102
10.1145/505248.505252
Comments

Despite the vast scope and profound business implications of IT development, management theory and models have yet to be transformed into workable project management tools for IT managers [10]. Not only are existing tools inadequate for software projects but also for management of corporate IT operations—as both process and corporate asset. Commercial tool sets are especially deficient, as reflected in the literature. For example, the "top management toolbox for managing corporate IT" described in [1] is a model constructed of 18 components as a tool set for IT management. These components represent management guidelines but unfortunately do not deliver operational (computerized) tools for managers.

In order to use software to compete, any organization needs both strategic management systems and tactical project management systems [2]. A development may be a superb technological success but a total failure for the business. One key is the intelligent integration of tactical tools and strategic goals. Here, we describe an Integrated IT Management Tool Set being developed at Ben-Gurion University for this purpose. It supplies most of the requirements set forth in [1] while also supporting the needs described in [2, 6, 10]. Moreover, it is more than a conceptual framework, representing a working alpha-level system.

Gaining visibility of IT assets and resources can make or break IT departments and the organizations they serve. Typically, efforts to improve an organization's ability to develop, deploy, and maintain software-dependent systems focus on individual productivity measures rather than on strategic (corporate) assets and needs [2, 3]. This view is too simplistic, as software (whether enterprise or home) is no longer developed by individuals. Software systems today are built, deployed, maintained, and operated by large teams of managers, programmers, analysts, testers, quality assurance professionals, trainers, and many others. Interpersonal communication has become the most important skill for IT professional success, involving omnidirectional exchanges among all stakeholders, including clients and users and occasionally even corporate investors.

IT is a large and increasingly strategic part of the overall corporate budget. CFOs and CEOs lose patience with their IT departments' inability to document and justify their expenses. To ensure the success of corporate IT efforts, quality financial reports, and responsiveness to data and events have become keys to success. In the current era of increasing global competitiveness and awareness of the limited time, money, and resources available for investment, IT no longer proceeds on faith alone, independent of cost/benefit analysis. IT departments are judged on the same metric as every other corporate department or unit—the ability to wrest maximum value for the organization from the allotted budget. Financial and operational visibility of IT assets and resources and the related best practices are paramount in today's IT management. Reducing the total cost of ownership of IT assets is only one aspect of the way IT management's performance is measured [9]. All managers need access to the portion of the budget—capital costs, services, and staff time—consumed by each component and service in the enterprise environment. Lacking this information, the organization risks leaking precious financial resources through assets with inordinately high life-cycle costs in ways that do not reflect corporate priorities. Worse, they are unable to replicate best practices throughout the organization because they cannot pinpoint groups successfully doing more with less.

Corporate bodies lacking automated accounting mechanisms are economically inefficient. IT departments are no different. Quality asset and resource reporting are not just ways to become more cost-effective. Implementing asset management (tracking and updating IT asset value) is a prerequisite for securing budgets for next-generation IT initiatives. Information in organizational databases and elsewhere should be linked to corporate financial systems for analysis and budgeting—and projected like all other business factors. But management statements citing "business goals alignment" and "best practices replication" might seem abstract to IT professionals who routinely address technical challenges [6, 7, 11].

To avoid unnecessary abstraction and ensure continual alignment between management practices and corporate business strategy, there must be a consistent and coherent link among assets, budgets, and resources, as well as with the activities and tasks on which tactical and strategic processes are based. The IT project success rate is lower than generally desired by management (considered by some to be "under 50%" [10], by others at about 16%); moreover, the reported proportion of projects using tools was 26% in [8]. One might wonder at the disparity of these rates. Clear, though, is that the degree of integration and the links between the tactical and strategic levels must be high.

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Business Trends and IT

Well-organized, integrated tool systems can make significant headway toward tactical and strategic linkage, as well as toward long-term IT management goals. This linkage has far-reaching importance vis-à-vis the handling of trends and governing management direction and corporate thinking, particularly, but not exclusively, concerning IT's contribution to overall organizational performance. Many technology and business trends affect IT, IT departments, and IT inventory and management [3]. Corporate decisions about delivering IT services have to be based on business considerations, including services to be delivered, service priorities, resource allocation, cost-effective delivery methods, and economic efficiency. The ability to hold services delivered accountable on a cost/performance basis is becoming both more difficult and more critical to overall corporate performance. For this reason, accounting mechanisms are critical, too.

E-commerce. E-commerce is an increasingly attractive way for organizations to reach both customers and suppliers. Executives have questions about return on investment (ROI) that IT departments are often ill-equipped to answer. But many new systems and subsystems have to be purchased to facilitate e-commerce, including those involved in financial clearing and firewalls. Organizations have to interface them with existing IT assets to maximize ROI and expedite implementation. Providing answers without detailing necessary investments with some granularity is all but impossible due to the general lack of an asset management concept. Although all resources have to be budgeted for the related implementation and management costs, IT management is ill-equipped to provide the information.

Recentralization. Many organizations control IT environments and gain economies of scale by recentralizing their computing architectures. Server farms, switched networks, and intranet deployment allow them to move away from the department/workgroup orientation characterizing LANs. However, taking control and ownership from lines of business raises political, logistical, and accounting questions. Can IT prove it can reduce the cost of running department applications? Is there a way to justify investments made to meet increased workload? Does IT have a mechanism for prorating the costs of shared resources? Can IT supply documentation to justify chargeback? Conversely, many organizations seek to spin off IT investments to leverage as profit centers or outsource them in an attempt to control costs while giving up some amount of that control. Such units must be able to meet requirements for predictable costs and track profitability of a given piece of business over time—standard business practice. The ability to track profits and predict costs demands effective cost capture of both activities and assets.

Application maintenance management. Application portfolios never stop growing. Surveys have shown, and the response to the Y2K bug two years ago confirmed, that major corporations have tens or even hundreds of millions of lines of code—in tens of languages and hundreds of applications. Before Y2K fixes were implemented, no one thought about managing IT assets; the quantities were viewed as relatively insignificant. Retention and maintenance of existing applications, along with the addition of new applications and previously unfamiliar technologies, are major challenges. The chronic lack of IT staff and increasing demand means the cost of employing IT professionals continues to rise. Higher wages mean that each activity-based event (such as support calls and maintenance) becomes more expensive. Capturing costs and associating them with appropriate assets and applications is a necessary component of accounting practice for all parts of all organizations.

Mergers and acquisitions. The corporate environment is increasingly fluid due to the dynamic and volatile nature of the global marketplace. IT has to be able to respond to acquired business units or is inevitably subsumed. What happens when a new parent takes over management of an existing operation? Typically, it begins folding the smaller operation into the theoretically more efficient whole—unless the smaller operation shows its practices are more cost-efficient. When IT organizations compare operating costs on an application basis, the result may be a fundamental shift in how corporate costs are viewed on or off the corporate balance sheet. This shift may extend the value of an acquisition beyond products. As IT becomes increasingly strategic to corporate performance, values assigned to IT practices and assets in acquisition targets become increasingly significant to the due diligence involved in valuing a potential acquisition. But how do executives and financing partners measure the value of IT practices? What value should be booked for corporate IT assets? How might such value determinations affect share prices if shareholders perceive a consequent competitive advantage?

Along with how accounting directly affects IT operations, many other areas, including upgrade planning, enterprise resource planning, and vendor consolidation, are critical to both IT and corporate interests. Each organization's accounting issues can differ depending on corporate accounting standards, chargeback policies, and ROI attitudes. But critical IT assets and policies are financial issues as much as they are technology issues. In addition to specific areas, broader trends increase financial pressure on IT departments to improve their financial controls and practices.

Asset complexity. Technology has become more diverse, there is more of it, and more people are working to support it. Management approaches acceptable for compartmentalized one- or two-tier environments do not hold up for n-tier convergent interenterprise terabyte computing.

IT managers need highly automated processes to cope with the multiplicity of cost events; asset management via systems provide effective, adaptable methods for integrating enterprise assets, including software, databases, human resource data, and networks. A cohesive solution is needed for capturing and analyzing the costs associated with IT service delivery. Quality information allows managers to make sound financial decisions about their portions of the overall business, which operations to budget for, and where to eliminate waste. IT managers are rightly valued for their intuitive skills and technical expertise. But IT resource management has become much too complex and strategic a task for intuition alone. IT departments need the same quality of data to run their own operations as they provide their counterparts in manufacturing and marketing [4].

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Integrated Management Application

The objective of integrated IT management is to provide organizations an application tool set for managing software assets, along with the processes associated with their development and ongoing maintenance and operation. This objective implies both overall control and appropriate feedback mechanisms. A generic, conceptual toolbox was defined in [1] for controlling corporate IT activities. The Integrated IT Management Application Tool Set we have been developing at Ben-Gurion University transforms this "what" into "how" by implementing the requested mechanisms, in addition to many other mechanisms needed for efficient control of IT assets and budgets. The system needs to support efficient management of meetings, activities, and events, from concept through respective follow-up activities. Confronting a flood of information, software project managers need to see beyond day-to-day details to get a broader picture. This perspective does not mean details can or should be ignored. However, managers often see only details. An innovative concept for presenting critical management information while providing collaborative intelligence with metrical analysis is needed to make sense of stakeholder risk and budget issues. The aim is to create an environment that encourages more efficient management while boosting team performance. Multilevel management control means that effective, multi-level communication is critical.

Project manager's automation. The Integrated IT Management Tool Set application forms an integrated environment for software project management and is a working prototype currently in advanced beta testing in a number of development environments, including corporate, academic, and military. It integrates essential and common managerial functions performed on software projects. Its heart is a database of stakeholder relationships, including action items and other ongoing relationship management information. Using its Audit and Review Manager module, managers plan and track implementation of audits of products and other deliverables, as well as project reviews. Management of project risk is facilitated through the Risk Manager module. Requirements management is supported through a series of other modules. The most important is the Systems Requirements Acquisition module, which is further supported by two facilities: one that computes GANTT charts (from requirement data flow diagrams) as a planning aid, and another that defines test cases from the systems state chart (primarily for integration testing).

These three modules—Audit and Review Manager, Risk Manager, and Requirements Acquisition—are to be augmented in the future to facilitate an even more comprehensive automated Software Development Planning module.

Testing is implemented via a Test Planning module. After test planning, the Testing Aids module facilitates email communication between testers and developers, regardless of their physical locations, while gathering critical defect metrics. These modules facilitate and encourage test-asset sharing. Action items arrive at the central action item database from other tool set modules and/or are transferred to other modules in the tool set.

Concurrently, action items, notifications of meetings, including audits and reviews, and other tasks automatically update developers' Outlook applications (from Microsoft, part of MS Office), thus forming a full and verifiable feedback loop. This loop is linked through a graphical user interface including an extensive glossary of software and quality terminology and acronyms; in the future, it will also include extensive software development procedures.

The figure here outlines the basic structure of the Integrated IT Management Tool Set. Table 1 lists perceived system functionality, including existing implementations and future directions.

Selected module details. The implementation details for the application's modules (from Table 1), differing significantly from discussions in the general IT literature, are described in the following sections.

Stakeholder relationship manager. Stakeholder relationships are difficult to maintain effectively. Frequently, they depend on simply remembering what each stakeholder requested, when it was requested, and the reason it was requested. The Stakeholder Relationship Manager module records and controls management activities relating to IT projects and products. All developing projects, even small ones, depend on iterative activities providing multiple feedback loops among project developers, management, and prospective users. These activities produce system development results, including requirement specifications, design sets, test designs, and code; the various review processes and events produce comments relating to them from stakeholders involved both directly and indirectly in development. The comments, or action items, represent the mechanism through which the module functions.

It also supports various activities related to the creation, updating, reporting, analysis, and management of action items. Data levels are managerial and provide detailed development data. Data types are defined as forms. Action items generally result from: customer or management review processes; problem reports; change requests; to-be-defined (TBD) reports in documents; and specifications requests (new or changes).

Audit manager. Reviews and audits support objectives associated with software quality assurance, project management, and configuration management, as well as control functions. The Audit Manager module defines the technical and managerial audits to be conducted, differentiating between required and optional reviews (see Table 2). This support is enhanced with guidance for users as to the kinds of documents expected for each review, whether required or optional. The data also represents a project-state-tracking mechanism via completed or partially completed documents or tasks.

Checker and templates. Software engineers invest only part of their time on code (in development about 10%–20%, in maintenance about 20%–30%). One of the most significant aspects of their work is the production of documents, including development plans, quality plans, and test plans, reflecting software requirements specifications, design specifications, test descriptions, and interface specifications. To enhance productivity and auditability, these documents have to be created with identical and consistent formats. A special template, per document type, can help ensure identical formats. The application's template can be tailored per use; for example, the development plan for a particular project will be similar to that of all projects, with local tailoring, depending on the current project's needs. A methodology typically has tens of templates. Different templates are available for the same document type, depending on the circumstances and the development standards being used. Templates are suitable for both development and maintenance.

The Checker and Templates module includes a library of templates, prepares the templates for use, places the proposed document in the appropriate directory with users' required (specified) document names, records use, and allows basic auditing functions (performed automatically but initiated by the author). In many cases, initiation includes template tailoring to use levels, depending on the user's view of project complexity. Standard checklist-based techniques for software document evaluation provide real-life metrics for project management and are usable for establishing an enterprise asset management database for use with, say, the Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO) and other project management techniques [5].

Software development planning. Software development planning is a basic, ongoing process in any software project. It is followed by and performed in parallel with project tracking, which begins before planning ends and continues throughout the project. The project planning process has to be tracked to provide a basis for an organized way of planning a project. In comparing this process concept with tools like MS Project, the differences are legion and should be noted. For example, standard project-management packages contain PERT/GANTT charts as a basic objective; project task tracking then augments the effort. Here, they are relegated to report status and are not the objective of the planning process.

Test planner. This module implements a forms-based method proven useful for software test planning tasks. User entries are stored with interconnected data items, yielding coverage and redundancy reports. During a product's manufacture, its various individual components are constantly tested—whether at the end or in-process. The information produced by this testing process must be incorporated into the system database to provide the traceability needed for a quality system. A primary emphasis of test planning is proving the adequacy of the corrective actions taken.

Testing aids. This module implements a technique for software testing and follow-up. Its objectives are to simplify tester tasks and improve communication between testers and developers assigned to repair operations involving the anomalies found by testing. The system consists of three components—one for the tester, one for the developer, and one for the server administrator. Please note that because there may not be geographical commonality among team members, a communication medium is provided through the server component.

The tester. A human tester executes software to identify previously unknown anomalies and measure performance. An integral part of this process is reporting these anomalies. Additionally, the tester needs to repeat the process causing the anomalies after repairs are made. The minimum amount of information includes recording results, performance measurements, (against requirements), and dates (and other event data).

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Critical IT assets and policies are financial issues as much as they are technology issues.

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Developer. Professional IT developers create and repair software, including source code, and repair the anomalies identified in the system being tested. They usually work under conditions of severe time pressure, so the quality of the reports they receive from testers may be a critical success factor. Reports are written to disk, and a database is maintained of the status of all reports, including closed reports. The user can query the system as to general status or the status of a specific report and update that status at any time. Reports, which can be generated at any time, are suitable for record keeping.

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Conclusion

Although the Integrated IT Management Tool Set is incomplete, it represents a practical effort to unite IT management theory, software quality assurance, software engineering, and project management models in a working and workable application. These aims complement the critical success factors in software projects described in [10] and the top management toolbox for managing corporate IT described in [1]. Moreover, the application is relevant for managing IT, as well as for individual software projects, as both a process and corporate asset.

The Integrated IT Management Tool Set provides not only management guidelines but is an operational tool for managers and project participants. Any organization competing today, supported by software, needs both strategic management systems and project management systems [2]. A development may be a technological success but a total failure for the business. Intelligent integration between the tactical and the strategic levels is needed.

Our future work will focus on the tool set's enrichment, until it supports all relevant requirements and needs. A complete tool set application will improve communication among those taking part in IT development, operation, and management. Software systems are built, deployed, maintained, and operated by teams of managers, programmers, analysts, testers, quality assurance professionals, trainers, and others. Interpersonal communication—the most important skill needed for success—must include omnidirectional information flows among all stakeholders, including corporate investors.

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