What kinds of challenges are IT managers with several years' experience in using portfolio management tools and techniques, facing? It's a topic near and dear to my heart: What kinds of requests are you getting and how are you getting them? By e-mail? Are they justified requests or things that business managers just want to do? That's the first problem.

The second problem is that the people (business managers) who want things done, like an SAP implementation, are making up ROI (return-on-investment) numbers. It's all guesswork. So if people are checking a year later (after the project has been approved and started) and want to know how it's going, there's no accountability. Unless you have good planning tools, you're going to get bad estimates.

I thought portfolio management software was supposed to help remove a lot of the guesswork around ROI and project prioritization. They (customers) sift through the data they have, but it's not good data.

Let's shift gears for a moment. Does Primavera provide any kind of ASP services? Are customers asking for these? Prime Contract is our ASP solution for the construction business. You have someone who manages construction contracts. Managing that process is a big deal. You have multiple subcontractors you're working with who each share information on specifications that go back and forth during the RFI (request for information) stage.

Prime Contract (an online marketplace) reduces the time to resolve things under the RFI process from two weeks to under a day. It's huge and it's worth a ton of money.