For as long as most people in IT can remember they have dealt with information chaos. Chaos in the volume of requests and changes happening. Chaos in the forever increasing number of technologies and applications that are available and being adopted. Chaos in how we simply track, interact and manage information and data.
Over the last 20 years tool sets within the Project & Portfolio Management space have come and gone, established themselves, grown and evolved, both on-premise offerings and cloud based solutions, with varying levels of success. So why after such a significant length of time are manual processes (spreadsheets/e-mail etc) and disparate systems still the norm?
The answer is due to the fact that we've only ever attempted to silo the chaos. By that I mean, rather than the straight out utter chaos of information and data flowing between many business units, we've deployed point solutions that, for various factors, solve a swathe of problems in each of those business units, separately. If a company was mature enough to deliver these point solutions across multiple business units, then they would ultimately have a perfect case of siloed chaos.
Each area inevitably has their own degree of success in reducing the manual processes, providing visibility to the heads of each unit, and perhaps a better understanding of how things are running.
However what is less successful is gaining visibility enterprise wide. Whilst this might not seem that important, in the context of obtaining additional funding for evolving and transforming operations, it has never been more critical.
There's a solution (or spreadsheet) for overall transparency, there's a solution (or spreadsheet, or worse!) for ideation, there's a solution (or spreadsheet) for Demand and in the interest of time, I won't continue this theme for Project Management, Project Delivery, Financial Management, Portfolio Management, but you get my point.
Why is it so complicated? Because not one of these point solutions talk natively to each other. Therefore, an enterprise-wide single source of truth is impossible, and leads to the chaos continuing to be siloed.
Of course point solution vendors will talk with confidence about integrating these systems together to share information (often in "real-time"). When in actual fact these integrations are high cost, high risk and rarely capable of delivering real-time information delivery. If you're in this position, it's certainly a worthwhile question to pose to any vendor positioning this that you talk to a customer with a current, active and successful integration.
The solution is to deliver on a single platform. Zero integrations, zero cost in integrations and zero risk in integrations. The broader the platform and it's capability, the more quickly you can turn off point solutions, reducing complexity, risk and often saving a bucket of money.
Organisations are being forced to transform and change at increasingly faster rates. It used to be a case of the big beating the small, but now it's the fast beating the slow, regardless of size. It is possible to breakdown those silos and provide ultimate enterprise visibility, aligned to corporate objectives, whilst moving the company at the required velocity to remain relevant.
It's time to ask yourself a few questions and get the ball rolling:
- Where am I?
- Where do I want to go?
- How quickly can I get there?
- How can I track benefits?
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