By John Zipperer

The evolution of IT from a collection of standalone silos to interconnected, flexible webs remains a work in progress. The goal is to permit CIOs to view their disparate, distributed systems from the perspective of the services they provide and support. A new approach, portfolio integration, pulls together views on the performance of software and systems across the enterprise. Its aim: improving management of software and systems, and the services they support. With new insight such as this, IT executives can focus less on the nuts and bolts beneath the surface, and more on how systems contribute to the bottom line.

CIOs are getting help in doing this from several fronts. New software features allow solutions to be used in today’s heterogeneous environments. New standards enable cross-platform, programming-agnostic communications. And some visionary CIOs have assembled executive dashboards and portfolio management systems that give them a 360-degree view of the infrastructure that supports their businesses.

Any CIO who hasn’t yet moved in this direction will start to do so in the next five years, industry experts say. As IT silos have gradually become connected, customers and partners who once interacted with discrete software programs or services—for example, placing orders or updating inventory — are now interacting with software and services that are interconnected with many other parts of the organization. Every component is essentially part of the virtual enterprise.

For CIOs, this change creates a new challenge: Namely, how to manage these interconnected systems. It also creates an opportunity for CIOs to change corporate mind-sets. CIOs need to account for their enterprises’ technology investments to a greater degree today than at any time in the past. By taking a holistic approach toward integrating their technology portfolios, CIOs will gain a deeper understanding of the enterprise. This, in turn, will allow CIOs to better monitor performance; it will also help CIOs report on specific services.

The need for this new view is clear. The rapid change in both the breadth and types of business technology shows no signs of slowing. For example, an enterprise’s mobile assets—both human and technological— represent a growing challenge as the number of mobile workers has exploded, fueled by a proliferation of laptops, PDAs, smartphones and other wireless devices. “We’re already seeing major corporations building strategic-level software that specifically targets deployment on the BlackBerry and other mobile devices,” says Tony Rizzo, Mobility Research Director at research firm 451 Group.

Another important change has come after years of challenging ERP implementations and attempts to integrate disparate and proprietary software systems. Not to mention a not-so-little thing called Sarbanes-Oxley, which has forced corporate leaders to pay attention to the integrity of their reporting — and the IT services that support such reporting. “It’s not just about IT services,” agrees Alan Nugent, CA’s CTO. Rather, he says, IT management really relates to the core, critical functions of a company or public sector agency.

All this can lead CIOs to the real value of what Nugent calls “broad-spectrum” portfolio management. While portfolio management usually refers to an enterprise’s software portfolio, in this case the phrase includes not only software, but also all the other technology and services that it’s connected to. This approach lets the CIO make associations between various parts of the organization, relative to how they contribute to the delivery of a service. These parts include the business service itself, IT services, hardware and software, and the people involved.

Today, this type of 360-degree view isn’t just nice to have; it’s expected. In an era where automobiles e-mail their owners when they need an oil change, companies expect their servers, applications and other IT components to be just as talkative. What’s more, the faster an IT executive can learn about a problem with an IT component, the sooner that problem can be fixed.

Enterprises also need to automate more of the activities in their IT portfolios, such as change and configuration management, licensing management, cost control and compliance management. So more CIOs are looking to integrated solutions that transcend server-to-server interconnections to reach the enterprise’s entire asset portfolio. “A lot of the things companies are doing today require them to have existing production systems integrated in new and previously unimagined ways,” says Don LeClair, a Distinguished Engineer and Senior VP at CA. “The faster you can build or construct new services using these applications, the faster your time to market, giving you a competitive edge.”

So Far, SOA Good
One approach to portfolio integration that has broad vendor support involves letting IT management focus more on what the actual assets do, and less on the underlying hardware-performance indicators.

Web services, for example, let organizations write applications that draw on resources, regardless of the operating system or programming language. An increasingly popular approach toward integrating Web services is the service-oriented architecture (SOA) concept. “SOA encapsulates and abstracts the services supported by the underlying software and hardware,” says Audrey Rasmussen, an analyst with consulting firm Ptak Noel and Associates. To do that, SOA makes connections between programs that in many cases were designed to stand alone. “Web services interfaces provide easy ways to interconnect disparate types of software,” Rasmussen adds.

SOA can also deliver real-world benefits by integrating management solutions, says LeClair. “If I’m a bank and I create an online-checking service, I have all kinds of things to support it — network equipment, servers, software and other IT assets,” he explains. “If there is a problem, I don’t care if there’s a network issue or a server issue. I just want to know if the service is up.” SOA management tools can enable a company to unite different management domains around its business services.

SOA Is Easier
Other benefits of a services-based approach include better management of the business impact of IT systems, more flexibility for changing services or elements in underlying systems, and faster rollout of new services based on the reusability of Web services programming. Also, SOA is now easier to implement than ever before, thanks to new, cross-industry standards. Because enterprises increasingly need to generate value from their IT investments, many vendors and customers are thinking of managing at the service level.

The heart of an enterprise services-oriented approach for a business is the configuration management database (CMDB). The CMDB stores information about the configuration, deployment and dependencies of all the IT assets in an organization. This lets IT managers see and track every computer in the enterprise — to whom it’s assigned, what’s installed on it, how it’s being used — and explore innovative ways of managing these systems. “A CMDB is really a core infrastructure requirement for an integrated IT management approach,” says analyst Rasmussen. “It is one of the basic steps to pull together and rationalize IT management data.”

There’s already a resource that’s helping. Called the CMDB Federation, this emerging industry standard uses SOA and Web services to integrate different IT management technologies.

While the ranks of services-oriented early adopters are still fairly small, solution providers and industry analysts alike expect their numbers to grow significantly. Even if a CIO doesn’t feel compelled to invest in SOA today, there is a strong need to build on a foundation that will lead to portfolio integration. And there are things a CIO can do now to build the foundation for that greater investment when the time comes.

The first CIOs to tackle SOA should be those in the most dynamic and competitive industries, experts say. “The more change you’re dealing with, and the more components you’re trying to integrate, the more you have to start looking at a services architectural approach,” says Judith Hurwitz, president of consulting firm Hurwitz & Associates and co-author of Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies (Wiley, 2007).

Most services-oriented enterprises are not doing “big-bang” approaches yet, Hurwitz adds, but are instead starting slowly, doing small integrations and building from there. “You’re not doing a quick fix, and you’re not throwing together something and moving on to the next thing,” she says. “Instead, SOA is something people will spend decades working on, as it involves so many pieces of an enterprise’s strategy.”

CIOs can also view SOA deployment as a competitive issue. For CIOs looking to provide best-in-class integration and business service levels, SOA could put them as much as five years ahead of others in their industry, some experts say.

A good first step for portfolio integration— in general or SOA in particular— is to capture all information about the enterprise’s business processes, advises CA’s Nugent. This documentation does not need to be deep, he says, just enough to provide a good sense of which operational business processes contribute to the ongoing and future success of the organization. Next, CIOs should perform a similar evaluation on the technology side. Once they’ve done that, CIOs can examine the documentation piece-by-piece, map the processes to the technology assets, and define roles. As portfolio integration advances through the enterprise, solution providers should continue to expand their IT integration offerings, in part to keep up with demand. “We’re starting to see a maturation of the solutions that is slightly ahead of the maturation of the IT organizations,” says industry analyst Rasmussen. In other words, the healthy evolution continues.

John Zipperer is a San Francisco-based writer and editor and a former editor of Internet World and Windows Server Systems Magazine