ICT Product & Service Life Cycle Management

In the world of IT, creating a solution is a fraction of the cost – maintaining and evolving it, keeping up with changing business needs and shifting technologies is costly. Traditional accounting practices add to the load as depreciation of capital expenditures creates an on-going drag on funding sources. So, ensuring that life cycle costs are taken into account with the initial investment, and managing product life cycles to ensure that necessary investments are made, and unnecessary products and services are retired in a timely fashion is a key Product and Service Management function. Also, maximizing ‘reuse’ of products and services – “why bring in yet another Customer Relationship Management system when we already have three” is a common refrain that often goes unanswered. Finally, understanding cost drivers, and influencing business behaviour towards ‘responsible’ consumption of IT products and services is an important part of the demand management equation.

Demand management

ICT demand management aims to forecast, size and influence customer demand for ICT services (existing, improved or new) to understand in advance how to best meet the needs and expectations of customers, clients, partners, and enablers with business constraints (supply).

Portfolio Management is an important demand management technique and tool (and, if implemented properly, a governance mechanism). Portfolio Management can help balance IT demand across time horizons (short versus long term), across risk/reward profiles (high risk/high potential return, low risk/low potential return), across business units or business processes, and across IT investment categories, such as IT projects and programs versus IT infrastructure. Portfolio Management can make these balancing acts explicit so that they become strategic choices (Portfolio Planning) rather than the result of natural “drift.”