Compuware said the Changepoint Supply and Demand Accelerator delivers a comprehensive starting point for an IT management implementation including prepackaged business metrics, process automation, templates, management portlets, and reports based on industry standards such as the Project Management Body of Knowledge and organizational best practices.
It said its Rapid Path service offers an initial implementation of Changepoint, using the Supply and Demand Accelerator. With dedicated consultants, guided customer preparation, and a train-the-trainer approach, the Rapid Path service enables an organization to get started with the solution within 30 days, it said.
Our View
Mercury Interactive was surely the first of the larger players to recognize that companies were increasingly finding a management and governance need that more traditional systems management frameworks were failing to address. But it won’t be the last.
It had been start-ups that broke the systems-management framework mold with more business-focused offerings that helped with the likes of project portfolio management, IT performance metrics, and IT-business alignment. A new category, IT governance, was created, built on a heritage started by firms doing what they previously called PSA, professional services automation.
Seeing their potential, Mercury Interactive bought IT governance player Kintana for $225m in 2003, and swiftly made IT governance – or as it called it, Business Technology Optimization – its rallying cry. A year later Compuware bought Changepoint for $100m, and shortly after CA bought another IT governance firm, Niku.
In their 2004 book, IT Governance, How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results, authors Peter Weill and Jeanne W Ross say IT governance is about: specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in the use of IT.
Analyst firm Butler Group says, IT governance is key to implementing the metrics that are instrumental in cost control and measurement of benefits, and particularly portfolio management.
Today as well as Compuware, CA, and HP/Mercury, players in the space include the main platform vendors, though they for the most part have rolled IT governance into broader suites that handle governance, risk, and compliance, GRC. So Oracle has its Oracle GRC and there is also an SAP GRC. Microsoft has capabilities in individual areas like project management and dashboarding.
IBM has its Workplace for Business Controls and Reporting software but argues that companies need not just a single product but elements of its Tivoli, Rational, Lotus, and WebSphere portfolios to tackle governance holistically.
Finally, there is a group of smaller companies specializing in one or more areas of IT governance: people like PlanView and Primavera in portfolio management, for example. Serena has an interesting take on what it calls Change Governance, a strategy it added weight to with the acquisition of project portfolio management firm Pacific Edge Software late last year.
Compuware may only have been doing IT governance since it bought Changepoint in 2004, but Changepoint, which started with professional services automation or PSA in 1992, is actually one of the more mature products in the category.
