Comments on PeopleSoft Enterprise Service Automation

Signed up and downloaded 5 documents on PeopleSoft's Enterprise Service Automation for IT solution, their vector into the space this weblog covers...

PeopleSoft is targeting Niku and related products, with an offering that focuses on project management and the aggregation of projects into portfolios. Techniques for ranking proposed projects based on cost, risk, and ROI are available (I believe Pacific Edge and ProSight also compete here.) PeopleSoft also leverages its considerable depth in Human Resources management for the resourcing aspects of project management; they would be a formidable competitor in this aspect. Other modules include expense management, contract management, an enterprise portal, and others.

No mention yet of application portfolio management, enterprise architecture, IT service management or the other major concerns of IT management. Like Niku and Mercury Interactive, PeopleSoft is focusing on the project spend as the key management point for enterprise IT, an assumption I find a little problematic, given that IT operations usually total more of the dollars spent.

I continue to be puzzled why the project portfolio management folks seem blind to this; I suspect it's because in order to fully understand operations costs and dynamics, a product must delve into the nitty gritty of IT service management.

Many organizations that use a centralized, repository-based time and project tracking have ongoing issues with project managers who are most comfortable with Microsoft Project as their workbench of choice (MS Project being a very easy-to-use and powerful product). Niku has attempted some integration so that their backend repository will store data created using MS Project, and PeopleSoft is following the same path. ("You can create detailed project plans and estimates in PeopleSoft or Microsoft Project...")

Will Microsoft Project's data model become a de facto industry standard? Where is the canonical XML format? Will someone (e.g. MetaIntegration) do a mapping of MS Project to the OMG's Software Process Engineering Metamodel?

-Charlie