Dennis Kennedy

One of my favorite legal technology topics is portfolio management - how a firm can create and manage an IT strategy by using the notion of "portfolio management," a Nobel prize winning concept as applied to investments.

I have seen in the last few days several solid articles on IT portfolio management, each of which I would recommend to anyone involved in setting IT strategy and to anyone trying to make sense out of what their IT departments are now doing.

"Portfolio Management: Dos and Donts" in CIO Magazine gives six best practices for getting started on IT portfolio management.

"Which Projects are Worth Your Time? from Baseline magazine draws on some real world examples and tries to share some lessons learned from experience.

Finally, "Project management is not the center of the IT universe" critiques a narrow, project-centered approach to IT and advocates practices more attuned to business goals.

The combination of these three articles will give you a good introduction to the idea of IT portfolio management. It's a fascinating topic that I've thought about over the years (I wrote my first article on the subject in 1998) and I've had the chance to speak about it from time to time.