Organisations invest large amounts of money in their IT systems. Whilst these systems deliver benefits such as automation and improved productivity, growth in the IT estate itself can create pain:
Increased cost of ownership. Whilst the best organisations only spend 2% - 3% of revenue on IT, some can spend up to 40% of their annual income on maintaining and modifying their IT systems
Increased cost of change. For many organisations the cost of change (and time to market for new products and services) is proportional to the number of IT systems that need amending to implement the change.
The pain is compounded for large organisations who struggle to keep track of the content of their overall IT estate, often duplicate functionality and cost, and find it difficult to determine and manage the risk of the impact of change.
The purpose of the IT Estate Modeller is to enable organisations to establish and easily maintain an overall model of their IT estate and answer questions such as:
Which parts of my organisation use which systems?
Which systems and organisational units will be impacted by change?
How much does each part of my IT estate cost and how is that cost shared amongst users?
Which systems support critical or regulated business processes?
Which systems duplicate functionality and cost and are candidates for consolidation?
Cataloguing
The tool enables organisations to catalogue IT estate and system details against their organisational structure.
Organisations and systems are defined as trees The tool also enables more detailed mapping, e.g. by defining subsystems, interfaces between systems and grouping systems within classes.
The interface modeller
Modelling
Once the model has been constructed, a variety of reports and diagramming tools are available to enable change managers to navigate the IT estate and determine the impact of their actions.
Reports work on the principle of "everything on one page" to simplify analysis
