Introduction
Some organizations believe they are not ready for a Technology Business Management (TBM) solution, either because their cost data is not complete, their IT Services processes are not fully defined, or they are not ready to take on a huge business transformation project. The truth, however, is that it is easy to get started with TBM today, making incremental investments and process improvements while realizing significant cost and productivity benefits from day one.
Reasons to Get Started Today
- Quick Time to Value: Customers of Apptio’s on-demand TBM solution can be up and running in a few days and usually find savings to pay back their investment within nine months.
- Improve Visibility into Data: Most IT cost data is incomplete to begin with. TBM will provide better visibility and analysis of existing data while guiding efforts to develop complete data.
- Deliver a Bill of IT: A Bill of IT can be deployed as quickly as a few weeks and provides the Business Units with visibility into the cost and value of IT Services. This often provides a quick win in eliminating unused services, recovering unallocated IT budget and providing support for cost reduction initiatives.
- Automate and Align Budgeting, Forecasting and Planning: Apptio enables IT to eliminate the costly and complex world of spreadsheets, gain real time visibility into budget variances and reduce the budget cycle time by as much as 50%.
- Guide IT Service & ITIL Initiatives: IT Financial Management is a critical element of ITIL initiatives and IT Service practices. It is important to accurately cost—and explain the cost of--an IT service before deploying a service catalogue or chargeback policy.
Get Started with the Data You have Today
Make Better Use of Your Current Data
Virtually no company has all their data in order when first initiating their IT Business and Financial Management initiatives. But that should not stop you from getting started with the data you have, whatever its state. A good TBM system will make it easy to use the data available, fill in the cracks with assumption-based or averages-based data, and increase the value of the data through better visibility, analytics, and relationship to services and business units.
With the better data analysis a TBM system provides, getting started with a TBM system will help find the holes in the data and guide system integration efforts and process maturity.
Don’t Be Hamstrung by Incomplete Service Definitions
Having clear IT service definitions is not a prerequisite for better cost and performance management. Better decision support systems and improved cost tracking can add significant value, regardless of whether it includes IT services.
IT Service definition does not need to be a ‘boil the ocean’ project. There are a number of different approaches to take when defining IT Services, each with their pros and cons, and Apptio’s professional services team can help you with this process.
Realize Quick Value. Build on Success.
Roughly 90% of Apptio customers realize significant savings within the first 9 months of use. This comes in many forms, but stems from the greater depth of visibility into the unit costs of IT and analytics capabilities to answer previously impossible questions. In every case, customers were able to realize significant value in a short time after deploying Apptio, garnering broader support for more impactful process improvement and TBM strategy.
An Incremental Approach to Greater ITFM Maturity
Every organization is in varying degrees of maturity in each of these processes—from virtually no existing process to rudimentary and manually intensive spreadsheet based tracking to more sophisticated, automated and collaborative processes. Each step towards maturity provides significant value in terms of monetary savings, productivity savings, real-time decision making capabilities and IT-Business alignment.
Many organization who want to start slowly have found significant value starting with these projects:
- Creating a top-down Bill of IT for chargeback or “showback” purposes
- Improving the Budgeting & Forecasting process
- Deep cost analysis for specific Service or Domain
Organizations wanting to realize the full value of TBM are starting with these areas:
- IT Service costing across IT for broad cost optimization and greater efficiency
- Deep IT Service costing-based Bill of IT for
- Improving the Budgeting & Forecasting process
- Deep cost analysis for specific Service or Domain
The Apptio TBM solution helps customers get started down the process maturity path towards greater IT efficiency and business alignment.
Easy to Deploy Software as a Service
Apptio is delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS), requiring no hardware investments, installation period or software support resources. This greatly accelerates your “time to value.” Customers can be up and running in a matter of days, depending on their data and model readiness.
Apptio works with each new customer to get them started in the Apptio environment; loading initial data, building cost allocation models and customizing initial reports and dashboards.
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