IT Investment Planning in ArchiMate
When you've lost count of the number of product demonstrations that you've done, you can sometimes end up on autopilot. So it often makes my day when an attendee at a demonstration throws me a curveball that I don't have a pat answer for.
One such recently was “How do you support IT investment planning?”
Now, it's the nature of our modeling tool that you can track any set of types that you want, define any attributes that you want and record any attributes that you want. Which was the gist of my answer. But it did get me to thinking, what would be the best practice?
After some conversations with a few customers, a best practice did emerge. First of all, the thing that IT managers want to track is what projects are using what resources. And the ArchiMate delivery extension proves extremely useful here.
You can model each project as a top-level work package, with the sub-tasks of the project as child work packages. And from there you can map what packages are touching what systems.
Building on this, it’s possible to track the estimated cost of each project (often imported from whichever project management tool is in use) and from this see which systems are receiving funding.
The other insight that came from my conversations with customers was a useful cautionary note - one of scope. An architecture modeling tool is not a project tracking tool. So it’s important to only track the level of information that is useful to gain insight.