What’s new

Now our methodologies, approaches and tools has been formalized in a comprehensive and exhaustive book “IT Strategy Made Easy”.

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MappIT has been upgraded to a new major release (2.0); this new release include, in addition to many bug fixes, some nice functionalities.

If you have already installed MappIT 1.0 and want to maintain your existing data you need to upgrade your database. In order to do that, you need to replace ONLY the Frontend application and copy an upgrade script in the installation root folder.

Please follow the installation instruction here for a full initial setup or just for a simple upgrade.

SUMMARY OF NEW FEATURES

Following is a summary of this new functionalities; they will be later described in mode details in some additional Post inside this Website.

Big Tables updates

• Big Tables  has been introduced and improved in order to provide a full and rich analysis experience. These are internal MappIT view built from the data model in order to consolidate relevant logical entities information. There are 12 Big Table in the catalogue:
  • Business Objectives: BT_BIZ_Objective
  • Processes: BT_PRO_Process_Activity
  • Capabilities: BT_APP_Capability
  • Modules: BT_APP_Module
  • Impacts: BT_BDG_Impacts
  • IT Activities: BT_BDG_IT_Activity
  • Sourcing and Spending: BT_BDG_Sourcing_and_Spending
  • Infrastructure: BT_INF_Infrastructure
  • IT Organization: BT_ORG_IT_Department
  • IT Staff: BT_ORG_Person
  • IT Skills: BT_ORG_Skill_Person
  • Initiative: BT_PRJ_IT_Initiative

• All tables are available using the MAPPIT embedded Analyze Tool, MS PowerPivot plugin for Excel or Tableau Software:

Skill gap analysis

• We have added support for Skill Gap Analysis,  now you can compare your IT Organization skill collected through Skill Assessment Template and Tools (already available in Ver 1.0) with the expected Role Skill. In this way you can understand which persons require training and improvement in you organization.
• Skill gap can be done in a very simple way through comparison of each person skills and his preferred role (as it is declared in the person profile).
• Skill gap can also be done through comparison of each person skills and his expected skills based blended role. In this case the blended role skill-set is built considering all role assigned to this person (in the IT Activities of the Operational model) weighted based on the % of time spent on each role.
• Skill gap value can be analyze through the Skill Big Table (BT_ORG_SKILL_PERSON)

Updates to other entities

• We have added some additional attributes to some key entities:
  • Person Entity: added attributes for  location, qualification, preferred role, age, years in role, years in company, salary, % FTE (partial time)
  • Process: added attributes for qualifying Business criticality (for Business as Usual ) and Business relevance (for Business Enhancement/Transformation)
  • IT Activity: added attributes for qualifying Lifecycle phase, Competence level, Level of control
  • Business Department: number of users

Sourcing Analysis

Inside the IT Activity form we have added an extensive support for displaying current sourcing model and estimate required sourcing model based on a reference sourcing framework,  I will explain in a tutorial this functionality.

Attributes and Entity help support

• We have added description for all data model fields and entities
• Now this information are visible in the bottom status bar, every time you set focus on a specific field in the form

Added spare fields

• On each major entity we have added 10 spare fields, in case you need custom and specific fields that you cannot find in the standard data model.
• These fields, can be customized (through configuration in the Configuration section of the left side tree menu) in order to assign a different label to be displayed in the related form.

• The spare fields are available in the following tables, forms and related Big tables (for analysis purpose):

• Business Objectives
• Processes
• Capabilities
• Modules
• Impacts
• IT Activities
• Infrastructure
• IT Organization
• Initiative

Added Total Values in Grids

• In each grid used to insert data related to many to many relationships between entities, we have added an additional row and column which is automatically updated  with the row and column total. 
• This information are very useful when you are filling the grid with new values

Massive Import and Update Capabilities

• We have superseded the previous Import capabilities with two new and easier capabilities:
  • Show Data in Grid: this is a button available in the “General Info” tab of each main form. This button allow to open the data in a grid view. This view can be used to see data in tabula format, but also and most important for copy (for export) and paste (for import) data to/from an excel sheet.  I will explain in a tutorial this functionality.
  • Update DB tool: this tool available in the “Tool” main tab allow to execute bulk actions on tables using a SQL script contained in a normal txt file. This allow for example to update an entire column of a table.  I will explain in a tutorial this functionality.

Sample Database

• In order to show the potential of MappIT we have created a Sample Database which contains sample data, but which allow to demonstrate all capabilities and analytical potentials of MappIT. This sample database is contained in the “\ImportExportFiles\Sample_Database” subfolder of your installation path. In order to use this database you must backup your existing database (in your root installation folder) and then replace it with the sample database. In case you use a different path/name for the database MappIT will ask to relink the database next time you will launch it.