A colleague of mine recently attended Gartner's Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Summit in Prague, where the talk came around to ERP4IT.

ERP4IT is term used within our industry to define a broad-scale integrated management system or IT automation system that enables IT to manage itself. Sounds odd, but when you think about it, we’ve spent years developing solutions that provide pivotal insights into financials and customers (with ERP and CRM packages) but have never delivered an integrated system of record, by which IT (and the CIO) can gain holistic insight into the value, cost and quality of IT services . ERP4IT is a term that's been around for a few years now – even though not a single vendor has officially adopted it. Most notably, it's a term being bandied about on Charles Betz's blog site (http://erp4it.typepad.com/erp4it).

And ERP4IT is not the only term being talked about out there. Indeed, at the PPM Summit, a Gartner analyst said that PPM is likely to serve as the centerpiece of what they're calling the "IT Planning & Control" (ITPC) system. Forrester, on the other hand, is using the term "Integrated IT Management" (IIM).

Regardless of what you call it; such a solution is sorely needed today because IT remains locked into managing discrete technology functions or silos and can never build the knowledge needed to manage and operate like a business. For an organization that has the clearest insight into end-to-end business processes, that’s not just wrong, its criminal!

As it stands today, any reference to ERP may conjure up images of failed implementations, budget overruns and mounting project delays. That’s because when you actually think about it, ERP is a set of tightly-coupled process automation sub-systems, which can be quite brittle when implemented. Failure in one sub-system can ripple through to cause failure in other sub-systems. And these failures may or may not be technical. Often they are merely business process mismatches -which usually lead to the need for wide-ranging sets of departments to change their processes at the same time - a Herculean task.

In light of that, what's truly needed is an alternative approach for ERP4IT, whereby an IT management system is architected as a loosely-coupled set of sub-systems revolving around a "Unified Service Model" (USM). Much like HR systems that have been architected around a common view of an employee or sales force automation systems that have been architected around a common view of a customer, IT needs to have a common view of what it delivers to the business, namely IT services. It should be an approach that is inherently fault-tolerant and flexible, and doesn't allow failures in one IT sub-system to infect other sub-systems - while allowing for implementations to begin with any of several sub-systems. Even further, it needs to incorporate federation and it needs to be standards based.

In the end, whether you call it ERP4IT, ITPC, IIM - what IT needs is a comprehensive system for IT management, governance and security. And as we all work toward building an effective system of record for IT - we're going to have to avoid making the mistakes that ERP has made in the past - which consequently will impact any so-called ERP4IT solution.

I'll be talking further about the USM in future blogs, but in the meantime you can read my white paper on the subject:
(http://ca.com/files/WhitePapers/unified_service_model_whitepaper_final.pdf).

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