Portfolio Management

The State has been engaged in a review of portfolio management tools. While many of these tools are feature rich, few address the real issues of inadequate customer business process definition. The illustration above reflects the complexity any portfolio management tool must address in the context of overall IT service delivery. If business processes are not well defined, how well can any tool be expected to work? Imposing an expensive tool on inadequately defined processes seems to be of questionable value. So how should an organization tie down their business processes so they can benefit from the process discipline such tools provide? Is there a practical and pragmatic approach for incremental improvement without using a "sledgehammer" tool approach?