ERP for IT

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Enterprise Resource Planning for Information Technology (ERP for IT, ERP4IT) describes the automation of information technology (IT). Therefore ERP4IT focuses on the automated IT itself and not on the automation of business processes by IT. The first who used this term was Ralph Szygenda, CIO of General Motors, as he said "The next thing is IT ERP. At GM, the complexity of managing IT is an astronmical thing".

[edit] Description

Accordingly, an entire ERP4IT approach and adequate solutions touch various IT disciplines such as:

DILIP

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
Project Portfolio Management (PPM)
IT Governance
IT Service Management (ITSM)
Application Performance Management (APM)
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)
Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM)
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
IT Asset Management (ITAM)
Information Security
Knowledge Management
Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
Business Service Management (BSM)

The term Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) might be a bit confusing because of its usage for business solutions. Enterprise resource planning software is software that can comprehensively manage the needs of a major enterprise resource area (money, productive capital, people, stock of goods or information). And of the major resource areas, only information (i.e., IT) lacks of integrated vendor solutions such as those offered by SAP ERP or Oracle E-Business Suite for all the other resource areas.

Respectively, ERP4IT focuses on a broader sense as well as on the comprehensive integration of different modules like the ERP system do. ERP4IT provides a process centric solution in complex information structures, implemented in relational databases for the IT organization to manage the IT itself. Due to the given complexity of the domains involved, IT services should become transparent and enables the IT to manage organizational and technical dependencies. ERP4IT shows the cost but also the benefit of the provided services. They should be measurable and contribute as single parts to the overall business vision and strategy.

Anyway, with the right foundation on industry standards, a de facto, federated, ERP4IT solution could start to emerge - that would radically improve the efficiency of enterprise IT.

[edit] Standards & Software

Many companies have a wide range of non integrated solutions covering several aspects of IT Governance such as: Project Management, Portfolio Management, Time Management, Service Management, Enterprise Architecture, System Management, Security Management or Asset Management.

Unfortunately, to this day there are no known standards for such an integrative overall solution that supports what the emerging subject of ERP4IT claims to be. In the past there have been several proprietary attempts to solve various pieces of the IT puzzle. But no comprehensive, integrated solution exists.