Datasheet

Alfabet Starter Package 

IT portfolio management has never been so easy

Make IT the engine for business innovation. The cloud-ready Alfabet Starter Package makes it easy by starting with the essentials and setting the stage with ready-to-use reports and executive-ready dashboards. 

Deliver smart IT solutions faster

As your business grows and takes on new challenges, IT is expected to keep pace with innovative business solutions. As your IT portfolio expands in size and complexity, delivering new solutions becomes increasingly harder. Inadequate transparency into architectural dependencies hinders decisions. Application bloat makes IT unnecessarily expensive and unwieldy. Help is here: The Alfabet Starter Package, a simple, straight-forward, ready-to-use IT portfolio management solution in the cloud – focused on application portfolio management and technology portfolio management. Get the IT insights you need to quickly meet business demands while creating the foundation for a well-run IT portfolio management practice.  

Key benefits

  • Fast setup, easy start, instant value
  • Reduced IT spend with IT rationalization
  • Improved agility with a clear understanding of architecture dependencies
  • Easy data management with Alfabet’s Smart Data Workbench
  • Maximum data quality with Alfabet’s Data Quality Rules
  • Informed decision-making on IT change
  • Accelerated time-to-market of digital business solutions
  • Elimination of IT information silos with one IT repository
  • IT portfolio management know-how from the start with built-in best practices
  • Fast access to important facts with out-of-the-box reports and dashboards
  • Adaptation to company needs with customizable dashboards, KPIs and roles
  • Increased productivity with insights at a glance delivered through a clean, intuitive and flexible user interface 

Features

The essentials of IT portfolio management

Start your IT portfolio management practice by concentrating on the core: your application and technology portfolios. With an easy-to-use interface, get immediate insight into your level of data completeness across these portfolios:

  • Highlight potential problem areas
  • Understand gaps in the architecture
  • Defend and support IT decisions
  • Define and plan your cloud migration strategy
  • Define and analyze compliance information

Multi-dimensional roadmaps help you plot your IT transformation. Focus on achieving attainable business outcomes with guided journeys to reach your goals.

Quick setup, instant value

This Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) requires zero configuration and implementation time. Realize value quickly with predefined business questions, reports and roles, as well as simple and guided data upload. Dedicate your time to building a rock-solid IT information repository rather than configuring tools.

Get important answers fast

The Alfabet Starter Package is centered on pre-defined reports that relate your IT portfolio to business outcomes. Architecture-based IT portfolio management ensures impact analysis and IT change decisions based on an understanding of the architecture. Analyze your portfolio and gain instant insights to address the most critical aspects of IT portfolio. Ready-to-go reports make it easy to decide and improve your IT.

Smart data management

Ensure data quality and identify bad data before it enters the system with pre-defined and customizable data quality rules. Simplify data management with the Smart Data Workbench with easy Microsoft Excel®-like inline data editing. Establish a sustainable data flow with easy data import and export.

Industry-proven solution

The Alfabet Starter Package is built on the Alfabet platform—a leader in enterprise architecture and IT portfolio management. Leverage best practices and a proven methodology based on years of experience Get to value quickly with an agile product rollout.

Path for easy growth

Start small and grow! The Alfabet Starter Package is the perfect fit for the essential needs of smaller organizations at low cost and no risk. Upgrade easily to Alfabet Enterprise Cloud as your business develops more advanced requirements.  

Instant answers to fundamental questions:

Governance

  • Who is responsible for our assets?
  • What should we be focusing on?
     

Transparency

  • What is our application portfolio?
  • What is our technical debt?
  • Who are our vendors?
  • What are our technology standards?
  • What are our architectural dependencies?
  • Which process areas require most IT support?
     

Rationalization

  • What are our investment/retirement candidates?
  • What are our cost drivers?
     

Roadmapping

  • What is our roadmap?
  • What is our landscape?
  • What is our target architecture?
     

Risk

  • Where do we use sensitive data?
  • How will IT failure impact our business?
     

Cloud Migration

  • What are our cloud focus areas?
  • What is our cloud migration strategy?
     

Investment portfolio

  • What are our most important projects?
  • What is our project budget?
  • What is the status of our project portfolio?

Technology Portfolio Management

Everything you need to ensure the success of your technology portfolio management practice

The challenge

The IT landscape includes a wide range of technologies, building the IT backbone on which businesses rely. With so many, it can be hard to know how to operate them all. Constant change due to new releases and new technologies introduced through projects and acquisitions makes this problem worse. Failure to get it under control increases operating and project costs and increases the risk of incidents and project failure. It is essential to have a robust, effective and efficient Technology Portfolio Management (TPM) practice, which:

  • Provides current and reliable information on the technologies in use and where they are used
  • Supports rapid analysis of the impact or changes in the application portfolio on the technology portfolio and vice versa
  • Facilitates the choice and definition of the technology standards to be used and enforces those standards
  • Clearly demonstrates the risks of using the wrong technologies
These four steps will help ensure success by:
  • Establishing the right mix of importing data from available technology repositories and manual oversight by technology owners and domain experts
  • Establishing technology lifecycle management and aligning lifecycles to those of the business applications using them
  • Defining and publishing standards that allow for variations depending on regional, functional and organizational factors
  • Managing exceptions to standards and ensuring their impact is assessed
Alfabet—the standard solution for TPM


Technology inventory

A single, central repository for technologies, technology usage and standards. It supports single and composite technologies as well as multiple taxonomies. Explore various aspects of technologies e.g., usage by applications and providing vendors. Data import and export together with wizards and data workbenches ensure that the inventory is complete and up to date.

Standards and exceptions

Build a catalog of technology standards supporting variations. Technical debt is assessed for the entire application portfolio utilizing the currently supported technologies.

Portfolio analysis

Make use of pre-defined KPIs or import KPIs from other systems. Portfolio diagrams and many other report types help to identify and communicate technology choices. Expose multiple technologies and versions for the same purpose as well as technology debt. Achieve cost and risk reduction by reducing the number of technologies in use. Enable future technology innovations, e.g., mobile or cloud, document and assess their ability to improve business. Assess the impact on the current landscape when planning technology transformation.

Life cycle management

Business question reports provide project managers and application owners an overview of the available technologies and their life cycles. This enables them to plan accordingly. Vendor information provides additional support to technology owners when creating technology road maps.

Application Portfolio Management

Essential tools to manage your application portfolio

The challenge

Business applications are core to the operations of any enterprise today, and they consume the lion’s share of IT spending. They underpin critical business processes for not only the enterprise internally, but also daily interactions with customers, partners, and suppliers. Being able to make the right decisions on the application strategy is critical to maintaining competitive advantage and profit margins. Because of this central role, it is essential to have a robust, effective, and efficient Application Portfolio Management (APM) practice, which:

  • Provides current and reliable information on applications to the relevant stakeholders
  • Supports rapid analysis of the application portfolio regarding impact from business events such as acquisitions, divestitures, product launches and entry into new markets
  • Has the analytical power to reduce costs, and improve application health
  • Can support IT management processes that require reliable application information, such as business capability model management and technology consumption.
Four steps to ensure success:
  • Establish the right roles and processes required to maintain the inventory and to make portfolio decisions
  • Gather essential information that cannot be imported from existing sources, such as the business context and top-down assessments of experts
  • Assess portfolios from a business perspective
  • Present the results in a format tailored to stakeholders, thus facilitating decision making
Alfabet—the standard solution for APM
 

Application inventory

Application owners and domain architects manage the inventory data using intuitive wizards and data workbenches on a single, central application repository. Business, technology, information, and functional perspectives, among others, are supported. Data quality rules ensure inventory completeness and data quality. An import/export framework supports initial load and synchronization with other sources.

Stakeholder support

Web- and mobile-based portals give application managers information at their fingertips on the application landscape, thus facilitating application rationalization and reduced budget utilization. Application life cycle reports enable technology owners to align their technology support plans and to understand application road map impacts. Ad-hoc reporting answers any stakeholder question.

Portfolio assessments

IT management, business stakeholders, and domain architects can analyze the portfolio along multiple dimensions, such as technology health, technical debt, impact, usage, and business fit. A multitude of diagram and report types support making and communicating decisions. Adding new information attributes on the fly supports ad-hoc application assessment.

Portfolio governance

Manageable portfolios are created with clear responsibility for capturing information, assessing portfolios and decision making. Standard business portfolios are supported, e.g., according to business capability or organizational responsibility, as well as ad-hoc portfolios. Ownership analysis help implement portfolio governance. 

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Solution
Manage your IT portfolio with Alfabet
Make sure your IT portfolio supports your business needs and is agile enough to pivot with the speed of change. Learn about how Alfabet helps you invest in IT wisely by managing your current and future IT portfolio.
Analyst Report
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Strategic Portfolio Management, 2022
This inaugural report compares 11 top SPM vendors, including Software AG. See who is serious about success in digital business.
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