Day-to-day activities with Alfabet FastLane
Maintaining accurate data and gaining business insights from that data is fundamental to strategic IT portfolio management. The typical day-to-day tasks in Alfabet FastLane will be to capture and regularly maintain information about the assets in the IT architecture and use that information to make informed and strategic business decisions about your IT portfolio.
Data workbenches and business questions in Alfabet FastLane are the nuts-and-bolts of managing and understanding your IT architecture. Data quality scores and data completeness are measured along all stages of IT portfolio management so that you always know how reliable your data is and where information gaps need to be addressed.
The following workflow describes the general sequence of user activities based on the user profiles they access Alfabet FastLane with.
Set up Alfabet FastLane and import data. This is the first set of activities that must be done before Alfabet FastLane can be productively used by the user community. Users with the user profile Portfolio Admin must create user accounts and user groups in in Alfabet FastLane, configure relevant evaluation and reference data, and import data to the repository. For detailed information about the tasks of the system administrator, see Portfolio Admin user profile: Let's get started
Capture and maintain data. After data is initially imported by the system administrator, users typically continue with data capture activities including adding new assets to the repository and documenting detailed information about the assets that already exist in the repository.
- Users with the user profile Application Manager capture applications and manage the application lifecycles. These users can also specify how the applications support the business architecture and exchange business data. These users can also specify which components the application uses. Data about business capabilities and organizations should already be in the repository in order to describe how the application supports the business.
For detailed information about the tasks of the application manager, see Get started with the Application Manager user profile
- Users with the user profile Technology Manager capture components and manage their lifecycles. For detailed information about the tasks of the technology manager, see Get started with the Technology Manager user profile
- Users with the user profile Portfolio Manager capture and maintain data for applications, components, and any other asset information that they have access permissions for. For example, this may include capturing data about the business, application, information, and technology architectures as well as the projects that are relevant to the IT portfolio. The portfolio manager has constant insight regarding the quality of the data and can initiate activities to ensure that the data is kept up-to-date.
For detailed information about the tasks of the portfolio manager, see Get started with the Portfolio Manager user profile
Analyze the IT portfolio by means of out-of-the-box business questions. Users with the user profiles Portfolio Manager and Portfolio Analyst have access to all business questions and analytics in Alfabet FastLane. Business questions are grouped to provide insight about the governance and responsibility of IT assets, transparency regarding architecture and costs, rationalization candidates, roadmapping the target architecture, potential IT risks to the business, cloud migration candidates.