All organisations exist for a purpose.  They make use of their resources to achieve some set of goals.  Very often those goals are only partially achieved or not achieved at all.  Despite their best efforts, organisations do not clearly understand what they are trying to achieve or how they are using or plan to use their resources to meet their objectives.

Control-IT is a new system that helps organisations to achieve their goals by helping organisations to determine the capabilities of their resources (people, assets and finance), how they are employed and how effective or otherwise they are being used.  By combining a rich organisation model that links the many diverse parts of an organisation (including people, projects, finance, assets and risk) with an application interface that makes use of the latest Web 2.0 techniques, Azimuth has created what we believe is a world class MIS system to help the modern organisation survive in an increasingly uncertain world.

Business Strategy
Most organisations have more ideas than they can readily implement.  People, assets and money are all in limited supply but are needed to implement any decision.  On one hand an organisation risks trying to implement too many decisions and failing in them all.  On the other hand it risks been under ambitious and not reaping the full potential of its people, resources and assets.  The Control-IT business module helps organisations rationally evaluate business proposals and select the correct proposals based on available resources and other criteria
• Submission of business proposals
• Comparison and selection of business proposals
• When used with Projects module facilitates the planned implementation of business proposal and the monitoring of progress
• In conjunction with Finance module, funds can be allocated to approved business cases and the financial return (ROI) on the business proposal measured

Projects
All non-trivial work is managed through projects.  Control-IT facilitates the effective management of projects.  By linking both the work deliverables and financial aspects of projects, Control-IT allows earned value management  to be effectively applied to projects.  Related projects may be grouped into programmes.
• The projects module helps planners to organise work around programmes and projects.
• Control-IT does not impose any project methodology but can be readily used to support various industry standard project methodologies.
• Control-IT makes it easy to stage gate projects – monitoring the progress of a project as it moves through gates.
• Projects can be broken down into standard work-break-down structures and tasks assigned to individuals.
• Funds in the financial module can be associated with individual programmes, projects or work packages.
• When used with the Risks module, project risks can be tracked
• Rich featured time recording - all users can book time against projects which is then linked to the financial module.

Finance
The Finance module allows for the setting up of budgets and allocation of money to projects.  The Finance module allows businesses to monitor expenditure as it happens.  Actual expenditure can be readily compared with predicted expenditure.  Trends are completely accessible.  Ownership of funds can be fully specified.   All transactions against funds are fully auditable.  Funds can be setup for specific financial years.  Investments can be tracked across financial years.
• Support for multiple currencies
• Splitting of management funds into subsidiary funds
• All inter-fund transactions double entry to ensure consistency
• All fund transactions controlled by owner
• Linking of funds to programmes and projects
• Full audit trail of where money is spent
• Automatic tracking of planned and actual expenditure per fund
• Ability to categorise funds based on operational and capital expenditure
• Easy to earmark and control contingency fund allocations

Risks
All organisations must manage risk.  Risks must be clearly identified and contingencies put in place.  The nature of a particular risk will change over time and it can be quite time consuming to monitor all potential risks regularly.
• Control-IT allows organisations to clearly define and categorise risks
• Risks may be linked to projects or the organisation as a whole
• The risk department can readily see the most important risks across the entire organisation while individual project managers can monitor risks on individual projects.

Assets
All organisations own assets.  Assets can include tangible assets such as buildings, machinery, computer hardware and intangible assets such as intellectual property.  Organisations both purchase and create assets.  It is important for any organisation that it gets an adequate return on its assets.  Control-IT facilitates the cost effective management of an organisation’s assets.
• In conjunction with the Finance module, allows the management of money flowing into and out of assets
• Records ownership and utilisation of assets
• In conjunction with the Projects module, manages the creation of new assets

People
People are the life-blood of any organisation and it is essential that management make the best use of their best resources.
• Records details of any organisation’s structure – divisional, departmental, team etc.  and who works where and who reports to whom
• Manages people skills.  Records details of what skills are most in supply and helps organisations meet future skills demand
• Helps individuals manage their time effectively
• People can find the information they need to do their job
• Managers can see what their people are deployed to work on
• People know the status of any pending requests and managers can see at a glance all items needing their attention

Portfolio Management
Control-IT treats a portfolio as a collection of entities.  The elements in a portfolio are evaluated against each other using one or more criteria.  The purpose of evaluating the elements in a portfolio is normally to measure how effective that portfolio is at meeting some objective.  The theory is that by fine tuning the constituent elements of a portfolio, that portfolio can be modified to better meet its objectives
• Asset portfolios – a collection of assets which might for example be used to measure ROA (return on asset), lifetime, and maintenance cost, depreciation, obsolescence etc.  An asset might be acquired directly or it might be constructed within the organisation typically through one or more projects.
• Project portfolios – comprise a collection of projects.  Projects can be evaluated by cost, ROI, NPV, break even, risk etc. Projects might be driven by competitors, markets, technology changes or legislative changes. Note that large projects or groups of projects are sometimes bundled into programmes.  It is also useful to limit the number of projects active at anyone time.
• Resources – the people, their abilities and their availability (supply) can all be modelled as portfolios.  The resource (supply) portfolio normally has to match up with the planned project portfolio or else the mismatch needs to be highlighted and addressed.  A company might have to few of one type of skill or an over supply of another based on the work it wants to undertake.
• Product portfolios – many organisations deliver solutions to their customers through products.  A product is its most generic sense is a means of providing a common solution to more than one customer.  Product portfolios are often based on market segments, cost and function.
• Financial portfolio – a financial portfolio can be used to describe a variety of financial investments.  Normally the elements of such a portfolio are evaluated under such criteria as rate of return, risk, duration of tie in.

Web 2.0
Huge strides have been made in recent years in improving web usability and allowing users to collaborate.  Control-IT builds many of these concepts into its core.

• Dynamic search - users can search for any information and searching takes place as they type.

• Tagging - the "folksonomy" of the web.  Users can tag or structure information, they can make use of tagging provided by other users and any tagging they create can be used by others.

• Collective intelligence - the system is able to detect similarities between users and present information to users that might be of use to them based on the profile of similar users.

Technical Details
Control-IT is normally provided as a service.   This maximises accessibility through standard web channels across your organisation.  Employees can access the system from their desktops in the office or from any location that can web access.  Reliability, security and performance are all readily monitored from a central location.
All data access is secured through a flexible security model.  All web access is through SSL.  Each user has a password protected account that allows them access only to the information that they need.
Where customers prefer not to use a service model, Azimuth facilitates the deployment of Control-IT on the customers own servers.  Control-IT supports all the major operating systems (Linux, Solarix, OS X, MS Windows Server ) and databases (MySql, Oracle, IBM DB2 and MS Sql Server).  In a typical deployment it utilises the industry standard Apache Web server.
No system can be an isolated island.  As well as allowing users to interact with it through the Web, Control-IT also has a number of features which allow it to interoperate with other systems.
• The rich Control-IT model is fully accessible (subject to security) through standard web services APIs.  This allows third party systems to fully interact with Control-IT
• Control-IT can also import and export data in a variety of data formats.
• Control-IT can trigger emails based on certain events within the system.  These emails can be plain text or HTML with URL links to data in the system.
• RSS aggregators are increasingly popular for keeping track of news feeds and blogs.  Control-IT can be configured to provide RSS compatible feeds with information on changes that occur within the data in Control-IT