TABLE OF CONTENTS Managing the IT portfolio is a complex activity that nevertheless has to be executed by many CIOs and IT department managers all over the world. In this chapter we will address this complex activity top-down to a level that becomes actionable. To give you a good understanding of the complexity and the way to deal with it, a distinction is made between managing the content of IT and managing the performance of IT . One cannot say anything about the performance of IT without taking into account the content.
The first part of this chapter will discuss the content of IT and the IT portfolio. It will focus on the fit between IT demand and IT supply that is also referred to as business and IT alignment . We start with the question: what is there to align? taking it from strategy/strategic choices to The Architectures and architectural choices. We will introduce the role of architecture in IT portfolio management, which will help us understand where to focus from a performance management perspective.
In the second part of this chapter we will return to the IT performance management grid that was introduced in Chapter 2. Here the performance management issues of all rows and columns mentioned in the grid will be dealt with. A description of the performance management activities concludes this second part.
At the end of this chapter the planning and control of the IT portfolio and the key roles in IT portfolio management are addressed.
