We help IT Departments gain greater visibility, control and accountability with a modern integrated automated management system.

• Business productivity and cost reduction                        
• Business agility and speed to market
• IT and business alignment
• IT reliability and efficiency
• Business process re-engineering
• IT strategic planning
• Revenue generating IT innovations
• IT cost reduction
• Security and privacy
• Globalization

Our Integrated Solution Areas (30+ Unified Modules and Components)

Ø  ITXG or ITEG or ITXgov - Executive Governance – CIO Dashboard with infrastructure and Finance Integration (capturing tier 1&2 status, Systems health and Budget/costs) value of IT investments, manage IT resources responsibly and mitigate IT risks

Ø  ITSM -   Service Management – Tier One Support , ISU RIA, Change Management, Workflow, client service interface, Knowledge base, Config-management – within adaptable frameworks (ITIL v3, CMMI, Prince2, ISO, PMI, Six Sigma etc…)

Ø  ITAM - Asset Management – Hardware/Software / Physical Property – Cost, Depreciation, Vendors, changes, Updates, etc…

Ø  ITALM - Application Lifecycle Management – CRM, App Inventory, Libraries, Versioning, DB Scripts, PPM, TM, SQA, Agile/Scrum/Burn-down –analytics Release Notes etc…CMMI compliant

Ø  ITFMi   -Finance Management (integration) – ISU integration of existing ERP systems to monitor, capture, and report on IT Economy

Ø  ITPPM- Project Portfolio Management  Tier One, ISU RIA, Analytics, Costs, PM Dashboards, Geo-Mapping, Stakeholders and much more – ITIL/CMMI/PMI/PMBoK compliant

Ø  ITTM -  Task Management – Tier One, ISU RIA, Member Dashboards, Task Analytics, Change Management etc…

Ø  ITRM  – Resource Management – Members, Security, Timesheets, IP costs, Skills and Technology Stacks, resumes, contracts, HR

Ø  ITBPM- Business Process Modeling – Tier One Workflow/Process Design modeler, ISU RIA,

Ø  ITCM – Configuration Management –

Ø  ITKM -   Knowledge Management – Intellectual Property Mindshare & knowledge base – Build, Promote, Share, invest in Enterprise Social communities. (Build a Smarter Company

Ø  ITCRM – Contact Relationship Management  Internal / External / Commercial / Vendor

Value Proposition overview

• ü  Real Time Connectivity and Communication
• ü  Real Time Capture of Digital Economy Health
• ü  Interactive Supply and Demand chain
• ü  Effortless adaptation of IT Standards and Frameworks (ITIL, COBIT, CMMI, BS, Prince, Agile, PMI, ISO, CPIC, SDLC, SIX Sigma)
• ü  Virtually Bridge the gap between People and Ideas
• ü  Enforce Enterprise Visibility and Accountability
• ü  Optimize Business Technology Portfolio against industry technology innovations
• ü  Effective Resource Management – Leverage and maximize talent skills while mitigating project risk, costs and attrition.
• ü  Integrated Risk Management
• ü  Business Process Modeling (Integrated Workflow Engine)
• ü  Intellectual Property Mindshare & knowledge base – Build, Promote, Share, invest in Enterprise Social communities. (Build a Smarter Company)
• ü  Eco-System Streamlining
• ü  Integrated process layering – Design, Plan, Create, Test, Deploy and Monitor complex business processes
• ü  Seamless Alignment of IT Eco-System with Business Strategies
• ü  Turn IT into a Profit Centre – Department monetization
• ü  Intellectual Property Security and Governance (minimized risk while minimizing loss of IP)
• ü  Effectively Communicate Department ROI & Profitability to C-suite
• ü  Systems Monitoring Automation
• ü  Business Process Re-Engineering
• ü  Reduce Administrative Task Redundancy
• ü  Quickly Design, Plan, Develop, Test and Deploy Applications

IS Untangle New Release

This new IS Untangle release is bigger and better than ever! For those of you not familiar with IS Untangle, it is an ERP for IT. It is great for those Project Managers who want to run an efficient team, as well as any Business Manager who want to communicate with their IT department to smoothly cooperate between the two.

IS Untangle has added many great new features in two recent releases that ended up combining together. Take a look at the following release notes so you can catch a glimpse of the new and improved IS Untangle! Don’t forget to check out our website and see IS Untangle in action by requesting a live demo from one of our awesome ISU specialists. We don’t byte

Just a quick preview of what we added:

• Technology Stacks for Users
• A new Outlook-style Main Menu
• Client Site Mapping
• Scrum Report Generator
• Enhanced Functionalities for All Modules
• Much more! We won’t bore you by typing it all out, see for yourself!

IS Untangle Application_7.3.0.0 – 03-18-2011_ReleaseNotes

IS Untangle Application_7.2.6.7 – 03-01-2011_ReleaseNotes

She writes:

Running a business enterprise requires many disciplines to work in harmony. Contemporary business functions include corporate finance, human resources, inventory and procurement, manufacturing and supply chain management and IT among others. For these business functions, an integrated suite of applications is offered by leading vendors such as SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft. The synergy offered between them enables business executives the control and visibility needed to achieve the objectives of the corporate mission and drive revenue expansion.

IT, however, too often remains fragmented in the way it works creating a sub-optimal management environment. There is rarely a single, cohesive system of record across operations, service desk, application development and other IT functions that can provide business-related controls for the IT operation despite investment in many best practice initiatives. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for IT is the concept of managing IT with the same level of due diligence that applies in corporate financial circlesóit equates to running the business of IT. In corporations, ERP software serves as the back-office of the business ensuring that finances, human resources and the supply chain are all functioning effectively. Similarly, ERP for IT takes into account the business aspects of running a well-tuned IT operation that understands and supports the mission of the enterprise.

Filling the gap between Business and IT without the complex integration of disparate systems.

It all starts with a great design and the capability to envision what the next 20 years is going to look like for IT departments. More and more large Software vendors try to quickly patch small gaps to satisfy client demand without realizing the are in a losing the battle against the ever-growing concern of Executive and IT Staff on the plethora of tools and systems they have to manage, control, track and report on. The larger the organization more and more organizational departments start to look like desolate floating islands.

The distance from each individual island begin to become greater with growth and expansion. Communication takes longer than what it used to. Strategic decisions that govern the enterprise have less visibility on what’s happening across the enterprise. So why aren’t the top ERP vendors doing something about it? – They are trying however the large bulky arcane ERP behemoths take a long long time to re-design from the ground floor a new system based on the dire necessity IT departments face today. Fortunately a Director of IT from one of the largest Chemical companies in North America suffered same issues and problems 8 years ago. Instead of waiting for the ‘Behemoths’ response he decided to invest his efforts in developing a flexible, scalable, fully integrated system that addressed not of the existing pains of the time but that of those that arise with the ever evolving technology expansion.

Thought became an idea, the idea became a plan, the plan became a design, the design became what is known today as Information Systems Untangle. A Comprehensive Fully Integrated IT Resource Management System for the Digital age.

This fast, sleek robust API integrable system gives enterprises a virtual surface area where there are no islands but one nation of connected business states.

Start to build your IT Nation – http://www.isuntangle.com

Using point to point solutions- disparate systems

IT Resource Planning (ITRP): The ERP System for IT Arrives

By Dennis Gaughan at AMR research

In researching the market for IT software during the past three years, we have seen a change in the IT organization’s demand for better information on how it supports the business. Companies are investing in portfolio management and Service Delivery Management (SDM) tools to help better identify and prioritize demand for IT services. They are also investing in Business Service Management (BSM) and IT Service Management (ITSM) tools to help manage the performance and cost of the supply of IT services. While these tools have helped, they just perpetuate the silo mentality that has existed in IT since its inception. But the companies that are more mature with respect to adoption of these tools see that the true value comes through integration across supply and demand, and the vendor market is changing to meet that requirement.

The Bottom Line: IT Resource Planning (ITRP) is an emerging market category designed to provide Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)-like functionality to the IT organization. This collection of technology will provide the visibility that CIO’s are demanding.  The business drivers and benefits are similar to ERP, so are the pitfallsIn many ways, the evolution of the ITRP market mirrors the early days of the ERP market, with vendors assembling more comprehensive sets of capability to meet the increasing complexity of customer demand. In fact, the parallels are striking.  Here are some of the business drivers and benefits: Global Support—Companies are globalizing their business processes; IT needs to evolve to support that. Enterprise Integration—IT organizations are spending too much time trying to pull together information from disparate systems in order to make planning decisions. Business Process Standardization—IT shops are adopting more formal portfolio management processes to manage demand. They are also adopting best practices like the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) to improve the supply of IT services. Organizational Agility—Business and IT alignment is the mantra of today’s IT shop, and a consolidated infrastructure is required for IT to have the responsiveness to meet the changing demands of the business.

The new version, 7.2.4.4, was released today; and in the wake of many new functionalities added to ISU, many are calling this application “ERP for IT”. Now, many may not know what that necessarily means, but a brief description would be: “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)”

Anyways, many of you have been fortunate to get a personal tour of ISU, and for those who haven’t, you can always request one on the website, or e-mail me at elish@isuntangle.com.

On to the new features you have all been waiting for! There is now the ability to add multiple Applications to your projects so that when creating Tasks, you don’t have to be so limited in only having one App to choose from. There are also many more SQA plan choices now, plus a “history” tab that keeps track of all prior instances of that plan. There have also been many upgrades in appearance, speed, faster searches, and performance of ISU.  There is so much more that I could talk about here, but it would be much easier for you to just get a look at the visual Release Notes and see for yourself: Download Here.

I expect big things for ISU in the following month or so, plus we are working on Task Recurrence and vamping up our Outlook Plug-In and Blackberry Plug-In.

Any questions? Feel free to e-mail myself or take a look at the website. Personally, the best way to understand ISU is to see it for yourself.

My question to you: What is you biggest IT headache, and what solutions have you found or are trying to find?

There are multiple assurance exercises that may take place in a project environment, the Project Delivery framework (PDF) lists them and they are monitored in the Project Control Plan (PCP) e.g. various walkthroughs and reviews. The values and benefits of these exercises are different, typically the audit will have Senior Management (up to board level) as customer or sponsor; a longer period of time for planning and execution (4-5 weeks); the impact of the findings and subsequent actions will also be more visible coming from an audit. Shell Internal Audit provides the Audit Committee, the Executive Committee and ultimately the Board of Directors, with an objective and independent assurance on the health of the internal controls that Shell uses to achieve its business objectives while the reviews and walkthroughs will be more project centric and usually confined to projects’ stakeholders.

Any project is an investment and carries risk. There are advantages to using an experienced project manager to help the project team establish quality standards and processes. The audit can then verify project status at key stages. The project sponsor may have some concerns or doubts about the state of the project. Or there may be one important aspect that is causing concern, such as cut-over planning. A good audit will increase business benefits by diagnosing the health of a project, identifying and prioritizing key issues and propose recovery actions or closure. The high daily running costs of most projects means that a timely audit will deliver the two biggest benefits, time and money. In that case, audits can add value to the business by providing reasonable assurance over the governance, processes, risk management and controls framework in place to ensure that the project is delivered on time, on budget and within the defined specifications. If the audit takes place at the close of a project, it can be used to develop success criteria for future projects by providing a forensic review. This review will provide an opportunity to learn what elements of the project were successfully managed and which ones presented some challenges. This will help the organisation identify what it needs to do so that mistakes are not repeated on future projects and so is added value generated.

One of our Audit Manager stated the following: “We don’t get to drill wells or open valves, but we do add value. We provide insights on gaps in the controls and the management of risks, and identify inefficiencies in how the business provides assurance. Avoiding costly rework and mishaps can liberate time to focus on core business delivery, or to more quickly assess, mature, and produce hydrocarbons.”. To achieve this, there are multiple approaches depending on the audit scopes (project delivery process or control framework of the solution built by the project) for enabling the business to increase the benefits that the project has to deliver.
The first one is risk-based auditing that focuses upon how an organisation responds to the risks it faces in achieving its goals and objectives, it aims to provide assurance on the management of the identified risks within the context of the organisation. This approach will not be for one specific project but more across a programme or a portfolio as these will be more at business or group level.
The second approach is compliance audits that will ensure conformity and adherence to the organisation policies e.g. PDF, plans, procedures e.g. usage of PRT and other tools, laws and regulations. These will happen for projects, programmes or even portfolio and will specifically address all divergences from the policies in vigor.
A third one will be about improvements of the framework including the tools e.g. PCP and Toolkit review, the result will then have potential group wide impact. Auditing the delivery process will require more of a compliance approach to ensure the team follows the methodology and use the recommended set of tools but it only makes sense if we keep in mind that this will not suffice to fulfill the triple constraint (Time, Scope and Budget).

Auditing the solution’s control framework will request a risk-based approach to assess the design effectiveness and if it is design effective, whether it is operating effectively.

As a conclusion, audits can adapt the approach based on the scope and so deliver added value to projects by delivering not only targeted findings but fit-for-purpose and relevant actions for managing effectively the triple constraint and achieve the right level of quality.

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