Destination: Advancing Enterprise Portfolio Management – First Stop: Issues Management
LEXINGTON, Ky., Thursday, December 12 — the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) today released the first in a series of issue briefs on Enterprise Portfolio Management. The publication is now available at www.nascio.org/publications/.
State CIOs are managing a growing and diverse set of investments, services and collaborative arrangements. Enterprise portfolio management (EPM) is a discipline that provides the tools and best practices necessary for doing this proactively and successfully. EPM provides a view into the enterprise – not only projects, but also services, operations, programs and resources. EPM essentially turns enterprise architecture into action. EPM involves many portfolios. The first portfolio that drives the others is the portfolio of issues that identifies, scores and prioritizes the very issues we’re trying to solve through projects, programs, management initiatives and operations.
“We’re kicking off our series on portfolio management and IT investment management with a foundational piece on issues,” said Jack Doane, co-chair for the NASCIO Enterprise Architecture and Governance Committee and director for the Information Services Division in Alabama. “Everything we do starts with a business need, or an issue. It is at that beginning where we need to initiate a discipline for evaluating and prioritizing the demand side. That is the issues portfolio. We need to be deliberate in deciding what to tackle – what to tackle alone – and what to tackle in collaboration with another agency or jurisdiction.”
“The state CIO manages a number of portfolios,” said Carolyn Parnell, co-chair for the NASCIO Enterprise Architecture and Governance Committee and chief information officer for the State of Minnesota. “While there may be some inconsistencies in how these portfolios are managed today, our ability to build discipline and consistency across the board is growing. Enterprise portfolio management is maturing. And we’ll see that maturity reflected in both the demand side and supply side of project management. As we consider options for delivering successful projects we also have more viable options today including cross-jurisdictional collaboration. These are all elements of the enterprise-wide portfolio.”
