The AI Data Surge

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Artificial Intelligence   Portfolio Management   Strategy  

In the last few years, the rate of adoption of project portfolio management (PPM) tools has expanded significantly. That continues today with the shift to the related strategic portfolio management (SPM) tools. And increasingly, those tools are being given AI capabilities to help with workflows, analysis, etc. This streamlines planning, modeling of different options, and everything from work distribution to resource management.

However, there is also a challenge being created by AI with some of these tools. That’s the impact of the use of AI downstream, in the tools that are being used to manage projects and related work. Most organizations have several such tools, at the very least one for traditional, plan-driven work and another for agile. And those tools are integrated with the PPM or SPM platforms to provide real-time updates on progress, risks, expenditure and so on.

The use of AI tools generates a lot of data. Not just the output itself, but also the data used and generated in order to produce that output—the audit trail of the “workings,” if you will. And of course, with AI automating some of the work previously done by humans around administration, there is an expansion of the type of data being produced.

And all of that data is important, so it needs to be preserved and stored—not just as the historic record, but to drive …

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