City of Tacoma IT Department Ramps up Governance, Accountability and Visibility With Innotas On-Demand IT Governance

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - May 29, 2009) - Cost concerns are reaching an all-time high, and with potential budget deficits which may lead to cut backs on expenditures, the City of Tacoma IT organization needed to find a way to categorize its work in terms of enhancements, growth, maintenance, and cost.

Tacoma's IT organization employs more than 100 IT professionals with an average tenure of 25 years. Its Information Technology Department provides technology services for city employees, customers, vendors and partners.

This group, led by Bradd Busick, Manager, Change Management, was challenged with communicating to senior management where people were spending their time, and how work was being prioritized and aligned with the city's overall strategic objectives.

Moreover, its Business Customers were demanding more value. "We wanted visibility into projects that were in flight, delayed, canceled, or partially abandoned. IT was tracking the business on eight different spreadsheets. Our Business Customers saw project delivery as a huge area for improvement," Busick says.

To support the process, the City of Tacoma implemented Innotas on-demand IT Governance to handle an end-to-end overhaul, managing everything from initial request, to project planning, estimating and scheduling, to project execution. People outside IT can access dashboards that show time tracking, status reporting, and exactly what IT is working on for them.

"Opportunities to track hardware and maintenance items are included in the Innotas on-demand subscription. Innotas blew away the competition," says Busick.

While Innotas on-demand IT Governance is built on a strong foundation in IT Project Portfolio Management (PPM), which is used to manage strategic initiatives, it also includes Application Portfolio Management (APM) capabilities aimed at providing visibility into sustaining IT operations and maintenance activities. These include Service Request Management, Application Management, Application Portfolio Management and Resource Management, as well as templates to support maintenance and application requests.

In many IT organizations, strategic initiatives are managed separately from sustaining operations, so IT management doesn't have a complete view of all IT activities. Innotas on-demand IT Governance delivers a single portfolio view of new projects as well as sustaining operations, thus providing CIOs with truer visibility and transparency across their IT activities and project portfolio.

Innotas, with its on-demand delivery model, also enables customers to be up and running immediately, and with data loaded, the system configured and people trained in a few weeks.

Relying on the Innotas built-in ease-of-use and packaged templates, the IT group was able to rapidly deploy the solution, and begin supporting its customers right away. As an example, they quickly eliminated an ad hoc reporting system and numerous spreadsheets.

Says Busick, "Incredibly we were up and running in just a few weeks with our initial baseline. Before Innotas, we used to manually track projects and change requests resulting in decreased throughput and backlog management challenges. Now, with just a click, we can justify IT's workload at multiple levels. Our backlog is finally manageable."

IT now provides KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to senior management with better predictability, facilitates cultural change, and implements new initiatives in a streamlined manner.

"We've become more agile and nimble. The Business Units now know what we are working on: new growth versus sustaining requests versus urgent requests. And now, we can 'hot swap' activities to better balance the IT portfolio. As a result, we have been able to service requests with more predictability," Busick says.

About Innotas

Innotas provides the only on-demand IT Governance solution -- an easy-to-use, rapid-to-deploy, and cost-effective way to manage resources and budgets across an IT department's entire inventory of projects, portfolios, applications, assets, and service requests. With its strong foundation in Project Portfolio Management and Application Portfolio Management, Innotas provides CIOs and IT management with visibility across both strategic initiatives and sustaining operations for improved decision making across the entire IT portfolio. Our customers, including the City of Memphis, Crayola, Forbes, Hamilton Beach, Jo-Ann Stores, The Northwest Company Inc., World Vision and many others, span a wide range of industries including financial services, government, healthcare, retail, technology, telecommunications and energy. For more information please visit www.innotas.com or contact us at +1 415.814.7700.

Contact Information: Contact: Seth Geisler Martin Levy Public Relations 858.610.9860