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IT portfolio management started with a project-centric bias, but is evolving to include steady-state portfolio entries such as application maintenance and support, which consume the bulk of IT spending. The challenge for including application maintenance and support in portfolios is that IT budgets tend not to track these efforts at a sufficient level of granularity for effective financial tracking. The concept is analogous to financial Portfolio Management , but there are significant differences. IT investments are not liquid, like stocks and bonds (''although investment portfolios may also include illiquid assets''), and are measured using both financial and non-financial yardsticks (for example, a Balanced Scorecard approach); a purely financial view is not sufficient. Financial portfolio assets typically have consistent measurement information (enabling accurate and objective comparisons), and this is at the base of the concept’s usefulness in application to IT. However, achieving such universality of measurement is going to take considerable effort in the IT industry. (See Val IT .) At its most mature, IT Portfolio management is accomplished through the creation of two portfolios:
IT Portfolio management is distinct from IT financial management in that it has an explicitly directive, strategic goal in determining what to continue investing in versus what to divest from. Information Technology portfolio management as a systematic discipline is more applicable to larger IT organizations; in smaller organizations its concerns might be generalized into IT planning and governance as a whole. IT portfolio management was first proposed by McFarlan.McFarlan, F. W. (1981). “Portfolio approach to information systems.” ''Harvard Business Review'' (September-October 1981): 142-150 Significant authors contributing to the discipline of IT portfolio management include Aitken,Aitken, I. (2003). ''Value-driven IT management.'' D. Remenyi, Computer Weekly Professional Series. Oxford, Butterworth Heinemann. Weill and Broadbent Weill, P. and Broadbent, M. (1998). ''Leveraging the New Infrastructure: How Market Leaders Capitalize on Information Technology.'' Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Business School Press., Maizlish and HandlerMaizlish, B. and R. Handler (2005). ''IT Portfolio Management Step-By-Step: Unlocking the Business Value of Technology.'' Hoboken, New Jersey, John Wiley & Sons., KaplanKaplan, J. D. (2005). ''Strategic IT portfolio management : governing enterprise transformation.'' United States, Pittiglio Rabin Todd & McGrath Inc., and Benson, Bugnitz, and Walton.Benson, R. J., T. L. Bugnitz, ''et al.'' (2004). ''From business strategy to IT action : right decisions for a better bottom line.'' Hoboken, N.J., Wiley The ITIL Business PerspectiveOffice of Government Commerce (2004). ''Business Perspective: The IS View on Delivering Services to the Business.'' OGC, ITIL© Managing IT Services (IT Infrastructure Library). London, The Stationery Office. and Application ManagementOffice of Government Commerce (2002). ''Application management.'' OGC, ITIL© Managing IT Services (IT Infrastructure Library). London, The Stationery Office. volumes also cover it in depth. Various vendors have offerings explicitly branded as "IT Portfolio Management" solutions. ISACA 's Val IT framework is perhaps the first attempt at standardization of IT portfolio management principles. In peer-reviewed research, Christopher Verhoef has found that IT portfolios statistically behave more akin to biological populations than financial portfolios.Verhoef, Christoper, "Quantitative IT portfolio management," ''Science of Computer Programming'' Volume 45 , Issue 1 (October 2002), Pages: 1 - 96 Verhoef was general chair of the first convening of the new IEEE conference, "IEEE Equity," March 2007, which focuses on "quantitative methods for measuring, predicting, and understanding the relationship between IT and value." {Link without Title} McFarlan's IT Portfolio Matrix
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