OREANDA-NEWS. June 6, 2007. Alfa-Bank’s experience in IT portfolio management was recently described in a Gartner report as an example of successful implementation. Martin Plessow, Vice-President of Service Delivery at Gartner, said: “Gartner EXP reports are VIP-level analytical materials developed for and distributed exclusively among the participants of the Gartner EXP program. For the first time, the specific experience of a Russian company was included in a report and will be read and discussed by the global CIO society.”

IT portfolio management (ITPM) receives increasing recognition as a management discipline to improve returns on IT investments. ITPM involves the processes, organization, governance and tools used to plan, develop, assess, balance and communicate the execution of the IT project and asset portfolios for achieving strategic objectives. Successful ITPM implementation to improve the profitability of IT investments was a focal point in the March issue of the Gartner EXP report which included Alfa-Bank’s experience.

In 2004, Alfa-Bank’s IT Department encountered a serious problem. Among the projects waiting to be implemented were about 800 medium and more than 50 large IT projects, and all of them were identified by customers as top priority business development projects. As a result, nearly 30% of these needed to be postponed every month, and dozens of them had to be delayed for more than a year.

“We realized that to solve this problem, we had to develop and implement a process of IT portfolio management that would help us to select only those projects that were required to meet the Bank’s key strategic objectives,” said Mikhail Kolenkin, First Deputy IT Director at Alfa-Bank. “Moreover, it was very important to develop a process that would satisfy the requirements of almost all units of the Bank. We had to find a proper balance between the needs of the business units launching new banking products and the infrastructural units supporting Bank operations. As a result of our work on the IT portfolio, we created and developed the ITPM system as a set of specialized processes capable of planning further IT development, maintaining accounts of IT resources, and implementing a new IT organizational structure.”

Today, three years later, Alfa-Bank’s IT Steering Committee, chaired by the CEO, meets three times a year to discuss and approve new projects. All projects undergo economic evaluation and the Committee applies uniform rules to evaluate them. “I am satisfied with the process,” said Mikhail Kolenkin. “The IT Department has become much more efficient and now we are always in possession of enough resources to meet our key goals. The CEO supports our principles of IT portfolio management since it helps to implement the Bank’s strategic objectives. Our initial task was to make sure that the IT Department would focus on the most important business priorities. We were hoping it would help us to improve our relationship with business units, because we strived to solve the most critical problems on time. We succeeded in that, and even surpassed it — an unexpected result was that the Bank’s management now does not have to operate in crisis mode.”

Regarding the fact that Alfa-Bank is the first Russian company to be included in a Gartner report, Mikhail Kolenkin said: “Gartner is a recognized world leader in IT consulting, and the publication of our achievements in such an important report is a sign that Alfa-Bank’s IT organization has matured to a certain level where our experience is of interest to the global community of IT professionals.”