Fighting fire with fire: the rise of enterprise software’s big change agent

CIOs engaged in driving digital transformation should consider Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety: It states that to persevere, a system’s internal structures must be as complex as the external forces challenging it. Your CEO, board, investors, and customers expect you to create the most advanced digital products and services. However, managing the complicated web of relationships, resources, interdependencies, and ever-changing conditions is requiring you to forge new territory in business history.

Few CIOs have all the resources and capabilities required to get a handle on this. Traditional, disconnected systems, processes, and applications are not equal to the mission.

In other words, CIOs must fight fire with fire. Breaking new ground requires a new category of solutions. These must help you connect planning, strategy, and delivery for everyone involved in digital transformation, as well as create the agility to adapt on the fly as things change both inside and outside your organization.

A $13.5 billion market has risen to the challenge. Elements of it are undoubtedly scattered across your enterprise already, helping smart employees and teams get work done. The opportunity lies in harnessing this technology to your advantage – as only a CIO can do.

WRM is a defining factor

Work and resource management (WRM) has surfaced as a means to give CIOs the ability to lift their organizations and connect all the disparate pieces needed to produce new digital offerings. This includes the ability to react quickly to both internal and external developments and opportunities.

Just as enterprise resource planning (ERP) eventually integrated the management of core business processes (and is now a $40 billion market), WRM brings together all types of work and resources across an organization to support company goals.

Using this new enterprise software category of solutions, you can translate strategy into delivery by continuously mapping your limited resources – technology, assets, locations, financials – to all the work that must be done by the organization to deliver innovative products and services to customers.

WRM gives you dominion over digital transformation planning and delivery rather than just letting it happen to you. It provides the tools, data, and insights you need to make informed investment decisions and prioritize your initiatives. You gain visibility into performance that spans strategy, projects, teams, products, financials, and resources. Your organization can better analyze emerging technologies, break down silos, adapt to change, and get work done.

Market significance

The WRM category uniquely combines the latest elements of strategic planning and delivery. Recent activity indicates the category is energized around a market estimated to be $13.5 billion in size.

• Atlassian acquired project management service Trello for $425 million
• Work management platform Smartsheet filed for an IPO earlier this year. The company had an $800 million valuation in 2017
• CA acquired Rally, an Agile development software and services company, for $450 million
• Work management software company Workfront has raised about $100 million of funding
• Collaboration and productivity app Asana raised another $75 million recently and is valued at $900 million
• Workspace app Slack is reportedly worth $8 to $10 billion
• Acquisition of Planview by Thoma Bravo for $800 million following Planview’s acquisitions of Projectplace, Troux, Innotas and LeanKit

CIOs need more than add-on solutions

Many IT service management (ITSM), ERP, and application lifecycle management (ALM) companies offer some sort of basic collaboration as well as project management assignment, tracking, and reporting functionality as part of their solutions. These add-ons are not sophisticated enough for the challenges facing today’s CIOs: It’s like fighting a four-alarm fire with a garden hose.

In the 2018 Magic Quadrant for Project Portfolio Management, Worldwide (Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Project Portfolio Management, Worldwide, authored by Daniel B. Stang, Matt Light, published May 29, 2018), Gartner makes the distinction between advanced project portfolio management and other categories of software:

“Project automation stemming from platforms and products in markets adjacent to PPM (e.g., ITSM, ALM, ERP) often does not work well for IT PPM leaders and IT PPM offices. These leaders and offices are charged with facilitating difficult decision making regarding the use of limited resources for project work. Whereas many pure-play PPM providers can blend both comprehensive project and resource tracking and reporting capabilities with the dynamic and advanced planning needed to support project investment decision making, non-PPM vendors claiming a PPM capability cannot.”

CIOs need dedicated WRM solutions that are calibrated for the complexity of today’s digital environments and the different ways people are working.

Built for advanced PPM

WRM provides the data, insights, and capabilities needed to harness all work and resource elements strategically in support an organization’s goals. Your teams can better collaborate and build the interconnected products and services that will deliver true value to your customers and catapult your business into a leadership position.

WRM solutions are all over your enterprise and spreading. If you fail to connect and adapt them to your unique opportunities, work methodologies, and desired outcomes, you may end up getting burned.

Planview

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