8Mange Integrated Enterprise Management Solutions

Why Cool: Many products offer detailed project management, efficiently tracking well-defined development and production activities. WisageTech, founded in June 2004 and privately held, offers 8thManage, a lightweight, scalable, comprehensive tool for managing complex, high-level, knowledge-based activities. Wisage refers to this approach as "Enterprise Performance Management."

IT leaders can see not only the detailed status of individual IT projects, but also a comprehensive roll-up of both "hard" and "soft" activities, visualizing aggregate resource commitments, personnel workload and machine utilization trends, potential resource constraints, and productivity metrics across large development and production environments, such as IT infrastructure and operations, as well as finance operations, business operations and sales.

Project management tools provide detailed status on a single project. The 8thManage product aggregates the totality of ongoing development and maintenance projects with the continuing "nonproject" processes, tasks, and activities that absorb two-thirds of the IT budget in most enterprises. It aggregates input from three domains: work activities and processes, organizational and reporting structures, and financial projections and metrics. Currently, organizations gather this information ad hoc, informally documenting meeting participants and notes, occasionally collecting financial data, and independently tracking project milestones. Managers sporadically learn of changes in organizational structure, budget assumptions or project status, but do not have an overview of how those changes impact the totality of projects in their domains. Giving the IT leadership team visibility into ongoing resource commitments helps management effectively control and direct resources toward the most high-value activities in the organization, tying activities to service levels, training budgets, hardware upgrades and facilities maintenance. This yields a comprehensive picture of recent, current, and likely future status of infrastructure and operations.

The core concept aggregates reporting from a variety of activities, including management planning, review, and control processes, such as meetings and executive communications. This enables all employees to understand the current mission, strategy, and technical implementation progress, milestones, resource commitments and challenges facing the enterprise. Applications include CRM for services, business intelligence across heterogeneous task domains, and coordination of collaborative work activities. Enterprises that have deployed the technology (including a very large Canadian bank, across a 500-person team in its IT organization) report that the tool supports business decision making with a clarity and simplicity that accelerates and improves the quality of ITOM. WisageTech has two patents pending.

Challenges: The core development team and executive leadership are based in China, making them somewhat inaccessible to Western businesses. While it has achieved success in East Asia, it needs to develop additional referenceable customers in Europe and North America to unlock these major markets. The 8thManage product competes with NetSuite-OpenAir and more-complex suites of technologies from Oracle and SAP, but at a much lower price point.

Who Should Care: Organizations that want a comprehensive view of complex, knowledge-based activities should consider 8thManage. In Pattern-Based Strategy™, 8thManage supports the disciplines of transparency and operational tempo (optempo).