Q&A: Artemis CEO on aligning IT projects, business goals

Computerworld - It's an age-old problem for CXOs: making sure IT projects that are being launched are also properly aligned with an organization's global business strategies. To help organizations address such issues, Newport Beach, Calif.-based Artemis International Solutions Corp. has developed a set of software packages that support IT portfolio management, project management, activity-based costing and balanced scorecard activities.
Next month, the company plans to release Version 6 of its Artemis 7 investment planning and control framework software, which will help executives see where capital investments are being made -- both from a vertical or business-unit standpoint as well as horizontally or across the enterprise.
Computerworld's Thomas Hoffman caught up with Artemis President and CEO Patrick Ternier today to discuss the IT investment challenges organizations now face.
What's the current focus for your company? We've historically been focused on developing solutions around R&D projects and IT projects. What we're trying to do now is develop techniques to fill a broader business mandate called "investment planning and control."
This is really the major driver for us today, pulling together a number of management techniques such as portfolio management, project management and, to a lesser extent, balanced scorecards. We're focusing on those areas for the industries that are the most critical for our customers, such as R&D if you're a pharmaceutical company.
When did you begin evolving to this model? We started to look at what was happening in the market three or four years ago in terms of the growth in the popularity of the portfolio management technique. In recent years, we recognized the importance of focusing on the value-creation chain for our customers.

Artemis President and CEO Patrick Ternier

Globally, it has very strong potential. At the CXO level, the common issue they share is this notion around value creation: how well you achieve capital and how well you invest in it.
What are the biggest challenges your customers are facing? From the CXOs we meet with, it is really the ability to link their initiatives with value creation, to make sure that the initiatives they've launched in their companies make sense in the global nature of their businesses.
How do Artemis' tools help them to address these issues? We have developed four major vertical industry solutions: IT management, public investment, fleet and asset optimization and new product development. So, for example, if you're in the pharmaceutical business, how well do you execute your portfolio to bring new drugs to the market?
We also have a similar approach for governments, where we tackleinvestments in the public domain.
Is the IT department leading other parts of the business such as sales or manufacturing to adopt portfolio management techniques? We see it the other way around, where companies have embraced a thorough culture of investment planning and controls and they see IT as one of the ways to provide value to the organization. So the use of portfolio management enters the IT department as part of the overall culture.

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