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PRODUCTS
Products
IT4© Governance
Cartography
Version
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IT4Control products
4PPM©
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4APM©
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4DRM©
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4ISM©
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4UDT©
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A flexible and personalizable IT governance solution
A range of functions that are scalable and easy to use
IT4© provides visibility for decision making and strengthen the contribution of IT to the business of the company. Information Technology becomes a differentiator and a source of productivity.
IT4© delivers the following Products , from ideas to reporting. IT4© can either be installed on site or be used as a Service (SaaS).
IT4© provides IT departments with a perfectly integrated and scalable solution for monitoring IT, meeting company business opportunities and communicating.
The range of IT4© Products rests on a software core that is highly scalable and easy to manage.
These Products are part of one integrated platform, IT4©, which meets IT system needs and helps in the tasks corresponding to IT system goals: - 4PPM®, « For Project Portfolio Management »
- 4APM®, « For Application Portfolio Management »
- 4DRM®, « For Demand and Request Management » concerning requests, bugs, incidents and other issues
- 4ISM®, « For IT Service Management ».
IT Service Manager is available with a KPI library for ITIL processes.
- 4UDT®, « For Universal Data Tracking » into the information system. This module will manage also personal data. This module is currently in its development phase.
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IT4© for ITSM & IT Governance
IT4© was designed on a full-Web technological infrastructure that is light, robust and secure
Our technology allows benefiting from the functionalities of a heavy client through an optimized Web client, without any deployment and while maintaining complete security. These functionalities provide more than consultation: they include calculation formulas, search definitions, complex report definitions, impression of pdf books, filters etc. The integrated Web configuration environment allows fast adaptation to the organization and specific processes of each company.
In terms of security, the integrated management of profiles and access rights guarantees that only authorized users will be able to access the information that concerns them. The solution is accessible in the HTTPS secure mode.
IT4's integrated repository
IT4© features a repository that is the true core of the solution and comprises the datamart for the information system: it classifies, consolidates and tracks the history of all information and data from the system. This repository thus integrates all data tied to applications, projects, technologies used, internal managers, external contacts, business, economic or technical indicators, etc. The repository can also be used as a CMDB for integrating all information necessary to operational use. It is possible to configure IT4Control products to establish rules for relationships and impact between IS elements.
Data management
Data is stored in a relational database that is the true IT department repository. It is thus available at all times through IT4© to provide reporting and performance indicators.
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4PPM®, For Project Portfolio Management
4PPM® is the portfolio management function designed for IT departments and IT managers, Project Managers and PMOs as well as Business Owners
4PPM® is the Projects and Initiatives Portfolio Management function that is integrated in IT4©. Its goal is to provide an easy-to-implement solution for piloting projects by means of their essential characteristics. 4PPM® is created for IT departments, Planning and Design, IS managers, project managers or directors, and small and mid-sized companies.
4PPM® provides a detailed description of each project in a project file, which is a veritable project ID card: project leader, sponsor, business criticity, expected business benefits, etc., as well as the business case and ROI, without forgetting all financial elements and elements tied to the planning schedule.
The lifecycle file provides information on current project status, risks, status of costs, progress, where the project is within its lifecycle, etc. 4PPM® next supplies the performance indicators and multi-criteria reporting on the projects to enable controlling their costs and associated risks and to avoid drift.
4PPM® provides a simple and concrete way to attain the following objectives
- Obtain a strategic overview of projects: 4PPM® provides a high-level overview of projects and the project portfolio in order to ensure a clear appreciation of the portfolio, to anticipate malfunctioning and thus to deliver projects on time and within budget.
- Implement operational piloting of projects: 4PPM® pilots projects to meet deadlines, stay within budget or execute project processes.
- Adapt project piloting to organizational evolution: company and IT departments evolve and project processes evolve with them. This is why 4PPM® is designed to adapt immediately to the organization.
Everything necessary for operational piloting of projects, without useless complexity
4PPM® features the following functionalities and elements for proper project piloting:
- The project file is personalizable and describes the components of each project (person responsible, sponsor, which organization is concerned, current status, business case, ROI, etc.). Financial elements are integrated: planning schedule, budgets, scheduled actions, completed actions at a given date, actions planned for year end. Elements tied to the planning schedule are indicated: start and end dates, milestones, etc.
- The lifecycle file describes project life: current project status, previous status, state of project advancement, next actions to be carried out, etc. The lifecycle file has a history that enables following project evolution throughout project lifecycle. Numerous elements may be added or modified to tailor the file to company organization.
- Management of tasks and planning schedule
- Entering of time on the time sheet
- Document management: it keeps track of documents that have been exchanged, at what time and sent by whom
- Specific reports related to operational aspects
- etc.
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Maintain a strategic vision
Thanks to 4PPM®, managers will benefit from, among others:
- An overall view of all projects
- Elements for analyzing opportunities for introducing new projects in the portfolio, such as the business case and ROI, or scoring reports
- Consolidation of all information in project monitoring and performance indicator summaries that can be used for decision making
- Consolidation of budget elements
- Simulation of the best portfolio according to precise criteria
- etc.
The solution offers a number of predefined or on-demand reports. Here, a trade-off report and a screening report according to the number of initial days, initial budget and ROI forecast.
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4APM®, For Application Portfolio Management
Lack of visibility on the application portfolio and the absence of reproducible management process cost the company money. 4APM® (For Application Portfolio Management) is the IT4© function you need to optimize Application Portfolio Management, eliminate useless costs, evaluate applications and attribute budgets to those that have priority
IT4's 4APM® integrates all the elements you need to pilot and streamline the application portfolio while increasing customer and business user satisfaction, reducing maintenance and operational costs, and controlling risk.
4APM® provides a true record of application health and an evaluation of applications as concerns needs. The final goal of Application Portfolio Management is to provide focus on value creation, decisions that need to be made and impact on business lines through the business value of the application.
4APM® is designed for the IT department, IS managers, application and production managers and business units.
Align the application portfolio with business needs
4APM® integrates and calculates the notion of application business value. Business value is then integrated in feedback to facilitate decisions on application portfolio management.
Business value can be updated regularly and completed with user surveys or with financial, technical or competence-related indicators.
Next, this information is integrated into performance indicators that can be shared by all IS participants, whether IT professionals (IT department, Planning and Design, operations, etc.) or not (business units, cost control, etc.). Different types of report allow comparing applications according to various criteria, benchmarking them, discovering those with the least value creation, the most expensive ones, etc.
Dynamic evaluation of applications according to their business, financial and technological value
and Collaborative tool for the IT department and business units that compares applications to business needs.
Obtain better visibility for deciding on evolution
4APM® includes the necessary functions to provide an overall view of the application portfolio, as well as of its components, applications or parts of the application chain. These functionalities are the following:
- Application reference: technical, business, urbanization, financial, associated competence
- Application files, "ID card" for each application
- Application lifecycle management
- Application mapping
- Integration of project components of the applications (upgrading, new functionalities, etc.) using the 4PPM® module or by connecting to third-party solutions
- Integration of upgrade requests and incidents using the 4DRM® module or by connecting to third-party solutions
- Taking into account application quality in terms of performance and availability
- Monitoring of indicators that provide application and application portfolio health status, most notably the number of operating points, maintainability, risk level, etc., through collection of information from CAST Software solutions by Application Intelligence or from other market solutions
- Specific or on-demand feedback and contributions with these tools, the company obtains the following benefits:
- Improved management of obsolescence
- Assistance for defining actions necessary for realignment with company standards
- Measurement of the impact of planned migrations and upgrades
- Assistance for defining budgets and reinforcing cost control
With these tools, the company obtains the following benefits:
- Improved management of obsolescence
- Assistance for defining actions necessary for realignment with company standards
- Measurement of the impact of planned migrations and upgrades
- Assistance for defining budgets and reinforcing cost control
4APM® allows slashing management costs by 10 to 30% and reducing the resources necessary for application operation
Return on investment is attained by industrializing the application portfolio management process, by eliminating studies and inventories that are no longer necessary, and by providing access to decision-making criteria for stopping, transforming or replacing an application.
Return on investment is both qualitative – re-assignment of investments to strategic projects – and quantitative – lowering of application maintenance budgets with a target reduction from 10 to 30%.
4APM® for SI urbanisation
Business process contribution
Example of indicators for piloting Third-Party Application Maintenance or TMA
4APM® includes indicators for piloting TMA. Means of providing data feed can be implemented so that TMA suppliers are able to provide the company with the indicators needed to validate that service is in conformity with the expected level.
- Volumetric indicators, such as the number of blocking MC requests
- Indicators of fulfilled commitments, for example respect of deadlines for validating blocking MCs with respect to the SLA
- Quality indicators, like the number of validation refusals
- Productivity indicators, etc.
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4DRM®, For Demand & Request Management
4DRM® is the module for managing requests, incidents and bugs.
Totally stand-alone, 4DRM can be used with the 4PPM® and 4APM® functions.
4DRM® was specified for faster response to user requests and an increase in IT team productivity.
4DRM® was designed to help industrialize the processing of requests and incidents, notably in the context of implementation of a quality and ITIL approach.
Its goal is to help the IT department offer better service for users and better-quality deliverables and to pilot responses in a way that increases team productivity. Managers will thus be able to decide whether company IT teams or external service desks are the best qualified and have the best cost-to-processing speed ratio.
Management of all types of requests
4DRM® collects requests concerning all events and objects related to information systems:
- Upgrade requests
- Assistance requests
- Bugs
- Incidents
- Projects
- Services
- Ideas for new products and services
- Strategic initiatives
- Detailed description according to type of request (category, reproducibility, severity, priority, version, etc.)
4DRM® then processes these requests:
- Classification
- Evaluation
- Validation/non-validation and approval using an integrated workflow
- Attribution of priority levels and certain details (configurable)
- Assignment of requests
- Management of associated notes
- Associated chat
- Reports and statistics
Assignment and processing can thus be allocated to the most profitable opportunities.
4DRM® takes into account the management of unforeseen tasks and calculates the impact of their potential repercussions, their degree of criticalness and their level of priority.
Cost management and productivity measurement
4DRM® calculates the cost of work done according to resources allotted.
These elements can thus be used to invoice clients for work.
Processed requests and their costs are archived in such a way that it is possible to know whether a request has already been processed and, if so, how much it cost.
The solution also supplies reports that establish how long it took to process the request so that productivity can be measured:
- By entity or service desk,
- By type of request (priority, business area concerned, etc.),
- By technology.
4DRM® can also provide the top n of elements (personnel, services, etc.) that are the most productive; the goal being to attribute budgets and resources according to these elements.
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ISM®, For Integrated Service Management
4ISM® is the module that provides reporting and performance indicators for information systems that integrate monitoring of ITIL processes
4ISM® collects, centralizes, presents and keeps a history of all pertinent indicators for piloting an IT department in a simple way. It supplies the appropriate reports and performance indicators that integrate company goals. Its filtering functionalities facilitate the creation of reports adapted to each user.
It integrates multiple sources and provides a coherent and reliable view of them (XML, databases, spreadsheets, flat files, software APIs, etc.).
Finally, 4ISM® automatically alerts the person in charge, for instance when service level deteriorates.
4ISM® provides performance indicators for IT department managers:
- IT Department
- Design and Planning
- Operations and Production
- Help desk
- IT production
- Networks
- Quality Department
- Cost Control
- etc.
4ISM® also allows defining the appropriate reports for communicating with general management and the business units.
4ISM® provides different types of Reporting
- A standardized reporting format that includes standard reports produced at predefined intervals and distributed to different users according to their profiles, either in pdf or Web format.
- Specifically designed requests and reporting: Users have access to reports that are adapted to their specialty. They have open access to information to obtain answers to specific questions, such as, "How many instances are found in the Oracle 8 database ?"
- A personalized reporting format that is easily created using configuration and drag-and-drop by a user or an administrator.
- Operational reporting: This type of reporting is produced according to an adapted frequency, which can be almost as often as real-time, to provide an immediate and continuous view of data. This is the case, for instance, of application availability for use.
4ISM® for ITIL: measure the efficiency of ITIL processes
4ISM features as a standard a library of indicators related to ITIL processes. Most notably, these cover the two major components of ITIL: Service Support and Service Delivery.
Service Support processes are piloted using indicators that measure the efficiency of the following processes:
- Service Desk
- Incident Management
- Problem Management
- Change Management
- Release Management
Service Delivery processes are piloted using indicators that measure the efficiency of the following sub-processes:
- Service Level Management
- Capacity Management
- Availability Management
- IT Service Continuity Management
At left, the 4ISM® portal with smileys indicating whether ITIL process objectives have been reached. Indicators are presented using arrows, smileys, traffic lights, etc., and details can be displayed by simply clicking on an indicator.
Concrete case: utilization by IT Department Operations
4ISM® is used to select the appropriate indicators from the ITIL library and from other indicators, in such a way as to provide the solutions and the indicators best adapted to the company. These indicators should reflect the goals of the IT department for the short, mid and long term. Filtering and quick configuration functionalities will allow updating indicators if objectives change.
We will give as an example an operational utilization. In this case, the idea is to implement the proper indicators for ensuring good support and supplying services according to ITIL. The indicators selected and integrated into 4ISM® will be:
- Average time for resolution of operating incidents (ITIL incident management)
- Number of active elements whose availability is measured (ITIL capacity management)
- Availability of services and applications (ITIL availability management)
- Number of service interruptions (ITIL service level management)
- Customer satisfaction by service and by application (ITIL service level management)
4ISM® can also be used to address a specific issue, for example abnormally long batch processing, which might be tied to future problems. 4ISM® supplies the following elements:
- Emission of an alert and a specific report in case of excessive duration
- Statistics on minimum, average and maximum time for each batch for each application
- Statistics on when batch processing is done for each application
- Monitoring of trend indicators
Advantages
Advantages for the operator are time saved (consolidation, calculation, correlation, feedback and reporting) and the automatic detection of problems that are potentially dangerous for operation and the quality of service supplied.
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UDT®, For Universal Data Tracking
This module allows the user to track data in the information system.
It modelizes the data chain:
Finally, where is data ? Which servers are managing this data...
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Light CMDB with IT System Maps
Thanks to IT4©, your company profits from a light CMDB with infrastructure and application maps at low-cost. IT4© generates maps automatically without any effect of drawing. IT4© ensures the description and consolidation of IT systems maps in a common repository. From this information, powerful predefined analyses can be carried out to identify rationalization options, and preview the impact of change. This facilitates the governance of IT Assets and supports overall enterprise architecture initiatives. IT4© offers the following functionalities
Deploy a common repository of your infrastructures servers, databases, applications, (CI or Configuration Items), including the configurations, the number of users, etc, as well as the details of the relations which link all these objects. Each object is equipped with all parameters necessary to its definition, its identification and its operation. This collection of parameters can be enriched along the time.
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Immediately visualize the links between your elements, your applications and reach all their features
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Analyze the links between an application and its neighbors and get a map of the applications and elements of infrastructure (CI)
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The map depth order analyzes can be adjusted (order 1: the application and its closest neighbors, order 2: with the closest neighbors of closest neighbors etc)
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- IT4© makes it possible to design all objects types which you need. A certain number of objects are proposed as a standard like the actors, the company organization levels or directions, departments etc, processes, applications, projects, servers, mainframes etc.
- All the objects created are inter-connected by relations which are also objects being able to contain other objects.
- Graphic visualization in the form of maps is entirely automatic. There is no need for to redraw a chart when this one evolved/moved. The system takes care itself of the updates and the recalculation of the drawings.
- The type of routing of the drawings can be selected: radial routing, automatic routing, no routing…
- All the maps thus generated are exportable in a standard format (Microsoft VISIO 2010) and can then be recovered on the cient station of the person in charge of the maps management. This last one can work on this page layout, and reinject it on the server by asking its page layout work to be memorized and taken into account at the time of the next automatic update.
- If the automatic calculation of the maps is an undeniable advantage and a considerable time-saver, it is also possible to create a personal map and then to reinject it on the server.
- During the generation of map layout, the system also calculates all hyper link for navigation. Then, it is easy to move from a map to another map by simple click.
- A particular care was taken to management styles objects. A screen dedicated to styles association allows you to configure quickly and easily the way in which you want to draw your objects (servers, applications etc) according to some properties of these objects. One thus can, by xemple, to associate a style of filling (color, reason, convex form) according to the type of technology used by an application, to associate a type of feature for the layout of this form according to another property and finally to also work the label of object according a third property.
- Finally, the IT4© solution offers many parameters making it possible to manage what you want to see and how you want to represent it. All these adjustments are memorized within a map /configuration. It is possible to create as many configurations as wished. For example, one can imagine the map of financial management, the map of the sales management, the map of all the /applications belonging to the ERP domain etc, while varying styles of representation.
- All the objects bound by relations can be charted. One can thus create a map of the processes, a map oriented to urbanization cut out in zones, domain, blocks etc
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IT4© platform versions
The latest version of the IT4© platform is the version 11.2
This version has been available since 2022 november. It includes new WEB services and API dedicated to the data flow..
Next version planification
The next version is scheduled for 2023. It will incorporates a set of new modules dedicated to the modeling.
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