ITM Software this week launched an integrated suite of IT management applications that early users and consultants said is something akin to an ERP system for CIOs.
The ITM Business Suite is a set of five modules designed to help IT executives manage vendor relationships, technology project portfolios and the process of aligning internal IT skills with business needs. ITM began shipping an IT governance and compliance management module, which integrates with other modules that are already shipping, and formally unveiled the entire suite in its announcement.
"ITM does a better job of customer partnering than any vendor I've ever worked with," said Madeleine Fackler, vice president of information management and CIO at LifeScan a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson that makes blood glucose monitoring systems. "Other software companies have asked me for my feedback, but not with the level of discussion that they had."
LifeScan began installing the ITM Business Suite in early 2003, and it plans to begin installing the vendor relationship management module next month, Fackler said. The company aims to run the software on an application server running Linux, along with a Windows 2000 report server.
Fackler said the IT Governance and Standards Management module will be evaluated this fall after her IT department has finished installing the vendor relationship management module.
The Martin County, Fla., government's IT department is currently implementing ITM's project portfolio module and expects to have the software running on either Sun Solaris or Red Hat Linux by the end of June, said CIO Kevin Kryzda.
Martin County began "rearchitecting" the structure of its IT department three years ago, and in doing so, "we wanted to make sure we were measuring how effectively we were meeting business objectives," Kryzda said. He said the county will probably begin evaluating the IT governance module later this summer.
Last year, The Concours Group entered into a partnership with ITM to offer the software to its consulting clients, said David Kruzner, senior executive vice president at the Texas-based consulting and research firm. "We work with Fortune 500 companies, and ITM's tools support governance more as a process than as a one-off event," said Kruzner.
Dennis Gaughan, an analyst at AMR Research, said ITM is not alone in offering such IT management applications; other vendors also provide software to manage IT governance activities and project portfolios, including Mercury Interactive, Changepoint and Niku.
But ITM has done well to take advantage of its position as a start-up company by soliciting detailed feedback from more than 150 CIOs over the past 18 months on functionality they'd like to see in its software, Gaughan said.