Organizations need strategic portfolio management tools to bring Agile across the enterprise. In the report, Forrester recommends that IT professionals look for Strategic Portfolio Management for Agile enterprise products and providers that support agile enterprise planning; include machine learning to accelerate and improve decision support; and offer robust integration capabilities for operational ecosystems. The report describes Software AG’s Alfabet as a product that “enables organizations to build a robust planning and delivery ecosystem with rich business operating model monitoring, process monitoring, and portfolio scenario analysis, plus deep integration capabilities to retrieve DevOps data from third-party tools to complete feedback loops. The vendor also provides differentiated ML capabilities.”

The report can be downloaded here.

Alfabet connects business strategy and IT delivery

Organizations invest a lot of time and energy developing a coherent strategy in the form of goals, planned programs, principles and target architectures. However, many good strategies fail due to lack of effective implementation. Especially now with the proliferation of Agile development throughout organizations, it is critical to close the gap between strategy and execution. Dr. Stefan Sigg, Chief Product Officer, Software AG, said: “With Agile development, IT is stepping up the pace of delivery. Following business strategy is crucial. Further, the insights won in Agile development phases need to make it to those responsible for guiding and possibly changing the strategy. Alfabet provides both the governance and agile decision-making aspects of digital product and solution development across the whole enterprise. We believe that this new report demonstrates the necessity of such a tool and are pleased that it recognizes Software AG as a leader in this area.”

¹ The Forrester Wave™: Strategic Portfolio Management for Agile Organizations, Q4 2019 by Margo Visitacion

Starting with release 10.0 (April 2017), Alfabet has continuously delivered features to support enterprise agility such as a decision framework for bi-modal development, integration with the Jira issue management system in use by many Agile teams, feature backlog management, demand-to-feature backlog transition and demand-to-investment Kanban reports for full lifecycle management of business demands. Alfabet also provides full support for the SAFe methodology for scaling lean and agile practices. These features help organizations evolve their portfolio management practices to support agile planning, decision making and delivery.

Newer releases provide AI-enabled portfolio diagnostics to explore and understand which aspects of the IT portfolio may need attention for discovery and analysis. Many organizations have portfolios with hundreds of elements and performance characteristics adding up to thousands of dimensions by which to analyze the portfolio. In enterprises such as these, it’s often hard to know which questions to ask to get to the heart of a problem. With AI-enabled portfolio diagnostics, Alfabet provide users – especially those without prior knowledge of the details of the IT landscape - with an entry point to explore and understand which aspects of the IT architecture may require change.

About Software AG
Software AG offers Freedom as a Service. We reimagine integration, spark business transformation and enable fast innovation on the Internet of Things so you can pioneer differentiating business models. We give you the freedom to connect and integrate any technology—from app to edge. We help you free data from silos so it’s shareable, usable and powerful—enabling you to make the best decisions and unlock entirely new possibilities for growth.

Learn more about Software AG and Freedom as a Service at www.softwareag.com.

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