portfolio lifecycles

Submitted by skeptic on Thu, 2008-06-26 21:37
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Here is an interesting article proposing the concept of portfolio lifecycles. The idea is that IT is about managing the lifecycles of portfolios of things, and the main portfolios are

  • services
  • technology products
  • assets
  • human resources (I prefer "staff": HR is inhuman)
  • information

When you cleave reality along a new crystal plane, it breaks cleanly: that is, if you come up with a new insight then how fundamental it is can be measured by how simple the resulting model is. It doesn't get much simpler than e=mc².

I think this model of portfolio lifecycles passes that test well. The concept is simple, though of course it soon gets into complex explanations (but not as complex as Relativity).

It shows how ITIL is only addressing one dimension of IT, the externally facing one.

It allows for a common model across all five dimensions, with local variations for each.

I don't think Charles has yet found the commonality, the universal model, across them which is the key insight still required. He's got to special relativity but not general relativity yet.

Published in The Skeptical Informer, July 2008, Volume 2, No. 7


Comments

Submitted by Cary King on Fri, 2008-06-27 14:16.

The model is terrific

Charles' portfolio model is an excellent adaptation of a corporate business model applied to IT. Kudos.

The customer-facing Service Lifecycle; the production-like Technology product lifecycle; HR; the information cycle; and, the vendor-facing Asset lifecycle.

It is particularly well-suited to the coming increased use of SOA, Virtualization, SaaS and utility computing, which will create a fundamental change to computing.

Cary King
Minerva Enterprises
Managing Partner
www.MinervaE.com

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