In the future, PPM will need to integrate with a host of enterprise-class management products. For instance, “service portfolios” represent some or all of the active services available to internal and/or external consumers. But there needs to be a way of representing services in development, and those transitioning into full production environments, to support provisioning, and a host of other operational activities.
Similarly, the properties of resources needed for projects are increasingly being stored in configuration management databases (CMDBs) and the configuration management system (CMS) as defined by the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Herein lies the connection for PPM and more advanced capacity and financial planning , as well as a dotted line to best practices initiatives such as ITIL. Many other management domains will follow a similar logical thread.
Lisa Erickson-Harris is a research director with Boulder, Colo.-based