Rational software can help you
Achieve greater value from your IT and systems investments
IBM® Rational® software helps organizations deliver greater value from their investments in software. This includes automation, state-of-the-art collaboration, and continual measurement through the IBM Rational Jazz® technology platform, IT and systems governance, and more.
It's all about innovation
Our goal is to enable business innovation and agility. This requires a significant investment in software, both for IT operations and systems development capability.
In today’s market:
- Software is increasingly being managed as a strategic business asset, key to enabling sustained business differentiation and flexible operations.
- Businesses everywhere are deploying increasingly intelligent, interconnected, and instrumented software and products.
- Enabling innovation, lowering costs, and managing change is dependent upon effective software delivery.
Software delivery is a business process that must be continuously measured and improved. IBM Rational offerings include a collaborative software delivery platform, capabilities, and time-tested processes to make software delivery a core business strength.
Jazz - innovation through collaboration
A key component of the Rational portfolio is Jazz, a technology platform for collaborative software delivery. Uniquely attuned to global and distributed teams, the Jazz platform is designed to transform how people work together to build software—making software delivery more collaborative, productive, and transparent.
The Jazz platform helps teams:
- Collaborate via social networking and virtualized team memory to overcome geographic and temporal gaps in the software lifecycle.
- Automate individual and team workflows throughout the software lifecycle, enabling standardized processes without adding overhead.
- Report on the overall process with real-time insight into programs, projects, and resource utilization, which means teams make better informed decisions and continuously measure progress against desired business outcomes.
Core areas of capability
These core extensive capabilities are where Rational products and services can help make a difference in your organization’s software needs:
- Architecture management: Design, model, develop and deliver superior software and systems.
- Change and release management: Improve software delivery and lifecycle traceability, from requirements through deployment.
- Enterprise architecture management: Drive the right decisions and plans to deliver on your business transformation.
- Integrated requirements management: Define and manage requirements and provide traceability and alignment with business processes.
- Product, project, and portfolio management: Align business goals, best practices, and projects for improved productivity and predictability.
- Quality management: Ensure software functionality, reliability, compliance, security, and performance throughout development and production.
- Targeted solutions: Solve lifecycle management and governance challenges for industries, SOA, systems and more.
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Time-tested processes
The IBM Rational product offerings listed above help teams automate a tried-and-true process that represents years of field engagements with real customers designing solutions to real business problems. Today, we deliver this expertise through two process frameworks specially designed to power agile software delivery teams: Measured Capability Improvement Framework and Rational practices.
Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF)
How do you know your new approach to software delivery is working? Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF) helps software and systems delivery teams drive business innovation through measured and continuous process improvement. MCIF helps teams gain competency in the core agile development practices that most impact business outcomes.
Rational practices
Provided through IBM Rational Method Composer®, which includes the industry-standard Rational Unified Process, Rational practices allow agile teams the right amount of process discipline when they need it.
Whether your team is just coming up to speed on agile software delivery techniques, or raising their expertise to new levels of capability, Rational practices provide a tailored approach to iterative lifecycle management for faster, more consistent results.
Extensive partner ecosystem
In addition, Rational has an extensive partner ecosystem that provides capabilities for specific industry and technology needs. These include Ready for IBM Rational software business partner solutions that provide both product and consulting expertise to accelerate initiatives.
In today’s business economy, effective IT governance is critical to the success of an organization and is essential to enhancing the value and efficiency of business operations.
IT governance
Organizations focus on the value of IT investments and the strategic alignment between the goals and objectives of the business and the utilization of its resources to effectively achieve the desired results. IT governance offers you opportunities to transform how you do business.
The importance and reliance on IT makes IT an integral part of the governance responsibilities of the enterprise and balances risk exposure, not only for investors, but also for regulators and auditors.
IT governance issues manifest themselves as the organization tackles core IT issues of efficiency, control, and value delivered to the business. A root cause analysis of these issues often uncovers blockages that can only be resolved by clarifying and strengthening fundamental IT governance processes.
Efficiency
Organizations that view the IT organization as a cost center often focus on key outcomes, such as improving system throughput, enhancing system stability, increasing code productivity, and reducing time to delivery.
For these organizations, selecting the right metrics and measurement control systems can serve as a quantifiable entry point to improving IT governance maturity.
Control
Organizations that prioritize IT issues of security and control focus on addressing the inherent risks of IT projects, including the risks of project failure, audit failure, and security and privacy breaches.
For these organizations, focusing on internal IT control systems can improve IT governance maturity as IT proactively manages risk.
Value
Organizations that view IT as a value creation center grasp the central role of IT organization as a strategic asset that can help the business penetrate new markets and expand existing markets.
For these organizations, a focus on product innovation and time to value can be supported through clear governance policies that help translate IT activities into measurements of business value.
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IT governance services
The IBM IT governance services are specially designed to help you assess key governance processes as they relate to nine of the most requested IT areas of governance concern:
- Sponsorship and organizational change
- Governance methods, processes, practices
- Portfolio management (IBM best practices)
- Risk management
- PMO and review boards
- Governance and control objectives (CoBIT)
- Project management
- Software and systems development
- Service management (ITIL)
The IBM IT governance services provide a structured service framework for assessing your organization’s IT governance maturity using a services-led review to identify and document IT governance processes and to assess the efficacy of those processes.
Within each discipline, the IT governance services can help identify the current state of governance processes, measurement and control systems, and IT chains of authority and decision-making. It can then work with organizations to establish a roadmap for helping themselves to examine and improve their own processes for governing the business of IT.
IBM also provides the Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF) to manage the incremental improvement in business processes. When your key time-to-market initiatives are supported by particular development approaches, such as use-case development, IBM can provide leading development practice examples in use-case development and MCIF to measure your progress towards applying these practices.
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IT governance services resources
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