History
The first mention of the portfolio concept as related to IT was from Richard Nolan in 1973: “investments in developing computer applications can be thought of as a portfolio of computer applications.”
Further mention is found in Gibson and Nolan's Managing the Four Stages of EDP Growth in 1973. Gibson and Nolan proposed that IT advances in observable stages driven by four "growth processes" of which the Applications Portfolio was key. Their concepts were operationalized at Nolan, Norton & Co. with measures of application coverage of business functions, applications functional and technical qualities, applications age and spending.
McFarlan proposed a different portfolio management approach to IT assets and investments. Further contributions have been made by Weill and Broadbent, Aitken, Kaplan, and Benson, Bugnitz, and Walton. The ITIL version 2 Business Perspective and Application Management volumes and the ITIL v3 Service Strategy volume also cover it in depth.
Various vendors have offerings explicitly branded as "IT Portfolio Management" solutions.
ISACA's Val IT framework is perhaps the first attempt at standardization of IT portfolio management principles.
In peer-reviewed research, Christopher Verhoef has found that IT portfolios statistically behave more akin to biological populations than financial portfolios. Verhoef was general chair of the first convening of the new IEEE conference, "IEEE Equity," March 2007, which focuses on "quantitative methods for measuring, predicting, and understanding the relationship between IT and value."
Read more about this topic: IT Portfolio Management
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