ERM Brings It All Together: A Single Dashboard for Enterprise Release Status

Enterprise software development has undergone a dramatic transformation in the last decade as most companies have transitioned to more iterative, agile approaches to software delivery.  This overall acceleration of the software development effort has been focused squarely on more tactical practices related to software development.  From source control to scrums to deployment automation, most IT departments are moving quickly and assembling a large amount of data related to software delivery.

Successes at the tactical level have yet to be integrated into systems to support more strategic decisions at the portfolio level.  While single projects can move quickly using a modern toolset designed to support rapid delivery large organizations managing complex releases involving considerable risk are still forced to manually assemble information from a heterogeneous collection of disparate IT systems.  ERM integrates information from a variety of sources to support a more continuous approach to planning and managing large-scale releases.

Systems Affected by ERMContinuous Integration SystemsDeployment Automation SystemsApplication Release AutomationChange Management SystemsProject Issue TrackersPortfolio Management ToolsMonitoring and Analytics SystemsAutomated Testing InfrastructureSource Code Management SystemsIT Portfolio Management Tools

When these systems are integrated, ERM dashboards become a single pane of information providing up-to-date information across the entire department giving management the ability to gauge progress immediately without introducing disruption in the form of status meetings.  Developers working on one project can gain an immediate awareness of how the changes they are making affect the overall schedule and managers gain fine-grained insight into the progress of a project.ERM serves to connect the low-level productivity tools that have come to define agile success.  The issue trackers, continuous integration systems, and distribution code repositories that are the signature of a new, more iterative approach to development are often in conflict with the static snapshots currently captured by today’s IT management and ITSM delivery tools.  With a modern ERM solution management tools are connected to the day to day realities of both IT service managers and developers creating a single source of truth allowing management to understand status directly from the source