Alfabet 11 from Software AG unlocks Strategic Portfolio Management for business users
- New functional design simplifies decision-making on strategic business and IT change and encourages collaborative digital business planning and management
- New user experience and AI-ready features reduce the Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) learning curve for digital business managers and configuration efforts for power users
Darmstadt, Germany – April 10, 2024: Software AG’s new release of its Alfabet product for Enterprise Architecture and Strategic Portfolio Management is set to engage previously disconnected business users in the digital transformation of their enterprises. The new release makes analysis of Alfabet’s uniquely large and interwoven repository of information on the IT landscape far more accessible to non-IT users. More contributors improves the quality of decisions on IT and business change to accelerate digital product development, reduce IT costs, and improve business resilience.
As business and operating models change through digitalization, interdependencies between business and IT increase and are essential to map, analyze and understand. IT is the production plant for the digital business and it’s difficult to find enough technical talent to manage this burden. Alfabet 11 facilitates collaboration between IT and non-IT employees in the transformation process.
Dr Stefan Sigg, Chief Product Officer at Software AG, commented: “We’re in a new era for how business is done. More products and services are digital and nearly everyone in the business has a vested interest in IT. Everyone needs to contribute and collaborate to properly analyze and decide what to do next. This is why we’ve re-designed Alfabet. AI is re-defining what accessibility to information means, so we’re removing the barriers to accessing, analyzing and sharing data that’s key to each individual’s role in digital transformation.”
Intuitive user profiles, streamlined navigation, and an articulate information search give more people transparency into the IT landscape and the ability to participate in the strategic planning and management activities around the digital product and service portfolio. New “smart data workbenches” and individually configurable views and reports let each user self-determine information content and form, reflecting the uniqueness of every person’s responsibility along the decision chain of enterprise transformation.
The three key new features in Alfabet 11 that are particularly focused on simplifying analysis and supporting user autonomy in strategic portfolio management:
- Smart Data Workbench: Allows users to fully customize information display, filters and graphics to get the analysis that they need. It’s also very easily shared to ensure collaboration across teams and departments. Its intuitive interface makes it very easy for anyone to pick up and use.
- Data Quality Rules: Allows any user to set the parameters for acceptable data quality, and also shows suggested fixes. This enables those who know the data best to ensure that it’s accurate for analysis. This ensures that information going into the Smart Data Workbench provides reliable insights.
- Fast-path Configuration: Applies reasoning-based AI on the Alfabet meta model to reduce product configuration effort. This is a key enabler for user-defined ad-hoc visualizations in the Smart Data Workbench as it automatically chooses the proper UI visualization element promoting consistency across user content areas and data workbenches.
Dr Stefan Sigg continued: “If you want maximum value from any SPM initiative, you must get as many people as possible collaborating in the process. Your decisions are only as good as the data that you have in the system to analyze, and maximizing data quality means making it easy for any employee to participate in SPM. We are finding with our customers that making business users “data stewards” helps to supplement the power users in IT and create an inclusive, collaborative environment that’s essential when managing hundreds of development teams and getting hundreds of digital products and services out the door.”
About Software AG
Software AG helps companies manage and optimize their operations, infrastructure and technology. Its products help to simplify complexity, connect siloes and increase transparency.
Trusted by the world’s best brands for more than 50 years, Software AG enables end-to-end connection, visibility and governance across geographies, IT environments, and complex business ecosystems. Enabled by AI, Software AG’s process mining & modelling, mainframe, IoT and enterprise architecture solutions are used by banks, retailers, manufacturers, governments and more.
Software AG is majority owned by Silver Lake, the global technology investment firm. For more information, visit www.softwareag.com. And follow on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).
