Enterprises often grow through mergers and acquisitions in response to the needs created by prevalent market conditions. While mergers may strategically position an organization to meet the market needs, the organization also inherits a large portfolio of information systems with a need to integrate these systems into a cohesive whole to effectively meet workflow needs of the newly formed enterprise. Large portfolio management and integration efforts, however, often find themselves struggling to get off the ground.

In this paper, Hannay et al. discuss some key challenges faced by large portfolio modernization and development efforts. First and foremost, these endeavors get stuck trying to define an overall architecture for the new integrated system before any development work can take place, much like the waterfall projects that tried to elicit all the requirements fully “prior to development, [...] which motivated the rise of agile management and development methods.” Next, managing a large portfolio is a significant strategic undertaking with very little guidance on how this should be done. Finally, there are no clear criteria on how to break this undertaking into small manageable projects with less risk, clear scope, and a clear cohesive relationship to and strategically aligned with the overall portfolio.

The paper offers a framework for managing portfolio projects to address these key challenges. The framework is an extension of methods and best practices based on service orientation and advocates organization of requirements, all the way from the enterprise strategy to the operational and technical systems levels, using a service-oriented taxonomy of capabilities. It further supports independent, yet integral, elaboration and refinement of these requirements organized as small-scale projects. The functionality entailed by these requirements can be realized as services, and service-oriented architectures can be used to build and rebuild system portfolios with agility.

The framework is presented in the context of a defense systems portfolio. However, it is equally applicable in any enterprise context where the information technology (IT) systems portfolio consists of multiple different systems. Integrating these disparate systems from a technical perspective is not hard to achieve since the web services standard and service-oriented architecture are fairly mature and provide an open infrastructure for software systems to interoperate. However, integration efforts for large portfolios are fraught with architectural and managerial challenges. One must first understand the workflow needs of an organization in order for this integration to be effective. Furthermore, large-scale integration efforts must be broken down into clearly scoped low-risk small-scale projects for successful outcomes. The framework described in this paper provides guidance on how this can be achieved.