IT Financial Transparency
From Black Box to Glass Box
Is your IT budget getting tighter while business demand is surging? Are your business customers clamoring for better cost transparency from IT? If so, you’re not alone.
While other business functions have mature business management systems at their disposal, IT is often managing their business on spreadsheets. You need a purpose-built solution designed for the specific challenges of IT to properly manage your business. Apptio helps by turning your IT from a black box into a glass box by exposing the cost, quality and value of the services you provide.
Apptio Helps You Drive Business Alignment through Transparency
Apptio delivers a complete suite of on-demand applications combined with best practice templates and expert services to quickly achieve these benefits.
Provide Transparency into Infrastructure Costs and IT Cost Drivers
Apptio’s IT Service Costing application reveals your unit costs and rates in a way that is simply not possible with spreadsheets or traditional business intelligence tools:
- Measure the unit costs for your IT products, such as your servers, networks, storage, service tickets and more
- Analyze your cost drivers, such as your fixed vs. variable costs and direct vs. indirect costs, to rationalize your investment decisions
- Easily implement activity-based costing (ABC) and total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis for your IT infrastructure, products and services
- Automatically incorporate financial, organizational, and operational data from disparate sources to establish a system of record for IT financial management
Value: Fully understand the costs of your IT services and products in order to make better decisions about investments and resource utilization.
Deliver Fair, Precise, and Defensible IT Cost Allocations
Apptio’s Bill of IT application enables you to deliver IT chargeback or showback in a language your business leaders understand:
- Automatically produce monthly statements that not only reflect the consumption and costs of IT, but also the quality and value of services delivered
- Enable your business leaders to view their IT costs by business unit, project, product, IT service or other customized views
- Demonstrate and defend the fairness and accuracy of your cost allocations
- Offer multiple service-level offerings (e.g., Platinum, Gold and Silver levels of e-mail service) to provide more cost-effective alternatives to the business
- Clearly communicate the levers your business leaders have at their disposal for adjusting the consumption, cost and quality of their IT services
Value: Start having productive conversations with your business leaders in order to balance demand with the cost, quality and value of IT services.
Automate the IT Planning Process
In many IT departments, the IT planning process is both painful and error prone. Apptio’s IT Planning application automates and streamlines the process while supporting many simultaneous stakeholders and sources of inputs:
- Provide real-time budgeting, forecasting, demand and resource planning that is mapped to your general ledger accounts
- Budget your resources at various levels -- by project, product, service and more
- Coordinate your planning online between corporate finance, IT and your lines of business, based on a common framework of IT costs and value
- Automatically reconcile your budget with corporate planning systems such as your general ledger
Value: Dramatically reduce the time and effort it takes to produce your budgets and forecasts and expedite your planning, analysis, and decision making.
Continuously Manage IT Financial Key Performance Indicators
Most IT leaders leverage key performance indicators (KPIs) for managing their business. However, many lack financial KPIs and instead rely solely on operational KPIs. This provides only half the picture. Apptio’s IT Service Performance and IT Benchmarking applications combine operational KPIs with financial metrics in order to reveal the business performance of IT:
- Benchmark your IT costs over time, across business units, and against third-party offerings
- Track consumption and utilization rates of IT products and services to demonstrate your Return on Assets (ROA)
- Identify direct costs associated with low utilization rates to quickly spot opportunities for cost reduction
- Monitor trends in IT financial performance, such as changes in unit costs, utilization rates, or investment ratios (e.g., run-the-business vs. grow-the-business)
Value: Make more informed decisions for improving business profitability and growth by combining KPIs for service quality, utilization, and financial performance.
Easy to Get Started. Quick Time to Value.
Just a few days with your data, your people, and our technology can help you understand your cloud-related costs to make more informed decisions. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or new to Technology Business Management, Apptio dramatically accelerates your decision-making capabilities with packaged application accelerators, a proven methodology, and best practices. Furthermore, our Technology Business Management CIO Council and end-user community serve as peer reference resources that will transform the way you manage the cost, quality and value of IT.
Need proof? Let us demonstrate our capabilities online. We’re so confident that once you see the power of Apptio’s applications, you’ll be ready for the next step: an onsite proof of value project that will demonstrate profound new insights in just a few days.
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Apptio IT Financial Management
A Methodology and Solution Suite for IT Finance Managers
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- White Paper
- Automating IT Cost Transparency
