CA releases playbook for strategic planning

  • New mobile app enables dynamic strategy planning
  • Expected to be available in South-East Asia in June

CA releases playbook for strategic planningCA Technologies has announced the CA Clarity Playbook, a new mobile application intended to empower CxOs to strategically manage their organizations’ technology investments in the context of their high-level business goals and objectives, right from their iPads.
 
Lokesh Jindal (pic), general manager of service and portfolio management at CA Technologies, said that IT and the business have to work hand-in-hand to create new revenue streams and deliver a differentiated brand experience, even in the face of finite structural and human resources.
 
“CA Clarity Playbook enables this critical coordination by giving executives the ability to nimbly adapt plans, activities and priorities,” he said.
 
According to a 2011 research study by CA Technologies entitled The Future Role of the CIO ‘Becoming the Boss’, few CIOs (chief information officers) are directly involved in defining business strategy, even though 73% of business executives acknowledge that IT is central to the execution of that strategy.
 
Clarity Playbook is intended to help address this disconnect by liberating CxOs from the manual annual planning cycles of the past, so they can more proactively take advantage of emerging business opportunities and technological innovations.
 
Forrester analyst Eveline Oehrlich, present at the Clarity Playbook press conference at CA World 2013 in Las Vegas, noted that there are three main challenges facing CIOs: Aligning IT to business objectives; accountability with senior management; and agility in meeting demands.
 
CA Technologies’ Lokesh said that in conversations with clients, it is apparent that CIOs are looking a “seat at the table” but don’t have the right tools to help translate what they have in business terms to gain that seat.
 
Oehrlich added that it was also about having the right metrics, presenting to management the right data and information to better illustrate the connection to achieving business goals.
 
“How do we map the metrics from one level to the next level? If CIOs don’t have the right metrics to present to their CEOs, it is harder to bring about change. It is about alignment from top to bottom, so the 360-view offered via Playbook is important,” she added.
 
Cameron McNaught, senior vice president and head of cloud and strategic solutions, international business, at Fujitsu Ltd, said IT is adopting more complex and fluid service provisioning models at the same time as it is becoming increasingly integral to the business.
 
“With CA Clarity Playbook, CA Technologies is directly responding to this confluence of complexity and criticality with a solution that gives corporate managers much-needed control of technology resource allocation and performance,” he said.
 
CA releases playbook for strategic planningDelivered via a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, CA Clarity Playbook integrates with CA Clarity PPM and other systems of record to provide CxOs with the intuitive dashboard-style mobile workspace they need to:

  • Define strategic objectives, goals and initiatives;
  • Collaborate with stakeholders on strategic plans;
  • Leverage information from operational systems; 
  • Assess alignment of IT investments with business objectives;
  • Visualize investment financials in real time; and
  • Evaluate impact of new priorities on in-place plans.

Clarity Playbook can draw from information sources both in the cloud and across the enterprise to keep strategic initiatives on track and aligned to organizational goals. Users can access the workspace from an iPad app or from a tablet or desktop running an HTML5-compatible web browser.
 
Clarity Playbook sits as a key enabler of the broader CA Technologies Business Service Innovation initiative, which enables customers to more effectively accelerate, transform and secure IT to adaptively meet the intensifying challenges of competition in a global information economy.
 
Clarity Playbook is expected to be available in South-East Asia in June 2013.
 
Gabey Goh reports from CA World 2013 in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the invitation of CA Technologies.
 
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Acquisitions and expanded portfolios unveiled at CA World
 
 
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