COMPUTER 10: Lesson 7 - File Storage and Online Collaboration
Top Five Misconceptions About Adopting Technology Business Management
1. Technology Business Management
Top Five Misconceptions About Adopting Technology Business Management
TECHNOLOGY BUSINESS MANAGEMENT
WHITE PAPER
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
IT organizations are challenged today more than ever
to provide strategic value to the business, to justify and
quantify that value, and to implement transformative IT
initiatives that can help the business make real progress
in trimming costs and being more agile and innovative.
Technology Business Management (TBM) is the practical,
applied discipline of maximizing the value of IT services.
As implemented by Apptio, TBM has helped more than
150 enterprises transform and improve their IT service
delivery.
Many organizations tell us that they would like to undertake
a TBM initiative but are reluctant to start, for a number
of reasons. This paper discusses the top five, separates
myth from reality, and hopefully serves as a guide as you
move forward with this fundamental and profound shift in
running IT. In brief, these myths and our responses are:
Myth: “I don’t have enough data or clean enough data
to get started.”
Reality: Most organizations have plenty of data but no
real information or analytics. Others have data that is
incomplete or inaccurate. Apptio TBM can help with both
situations. If you have a general ledger or similar financial
system and basic IT operational systems, you have what
you need to start gleaning powerful insights. Apptio will
help you create a roadmap for improving your data over
time—but you can get started now.
Myth: “I don’t have the people or resources required to
undertake TBM.”
Reality: You are probably already expending resources on
TBM-related activities, just not by that name. Do you have
a financial transparency or infrastructure optimization
initiative underway? A cloud initiative? How many people
are involved? Apptio can help you use the very same
resources more efficiently to do even more. You can get
started with as little as half a full-time equivalent (FTE)
devoted to TBM.
Myth: “I have other, higher-priority projects that I need
to do before I start TBM.”
Reality: Again, chances are that you are already expending
resources on major IT initiatives that could be accelerated
and made more efficient by TBM. By automating manual
processes, Apptio TBM frees up time and resources for
innovative projects and helps change the conversation
with the business about IT. You don’t need to go “all in”
with TBM; you can introduce TBM in one or two already-
scheduled projects, such as application rationalization, IT-
business alignment, or data center consolidation.
Myth: “TBM is no different than the insights that I get
from my current financial and IT systems.”
Reality: Apptio TBM is complementary to your current
financial and IT systems. It aggregates data from these
systems and translates it into business-value insights.
While financial and IT monitoring and service management
systems provide plenty of data, they are examples
of “siloed” data that do not provide the analytics and
contextual insights needed to improve specific IT services
or accelerate the Chief Information Officer’s (CIO’s) ability
to drive business innovation.
Myth: “I don’t know how to build a business case
around TBM.”
Reality: While TBM can certainly deliver cost savings,
even more significant value comes from its ability to help
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2. Technology Business Management
Top Five Misconceptions About Adopting Technology Business Management
CIOs and IT leaders run IT like a business. It will help you
automate and accelerate manual analysis and decision-
making and yield strategic insights about the value of IT
to the business. TBM can help you establish a baseline of
your current IT service costs and capabilities and create a
quantifiable roadmap for improving them.
In summary, TBM can make a profound difference in
your organization, as it has for Apptio customers such as
Boeing, Microsoft, Cisco, and Starbucks. Spend a few
minutes reading our complete responses to these myths
so that you can start reaping the benefits of Apptio TBM
today.
Top Five Myths About Adopting Technology
Business Management—Demystified
“I don’t have enough data or clean enough data to get
started.”
Most organizations have plenty of data but no real
information or analytics. Others have “dirty” data—data that
is incomplete or inaccurate. Apptio TBM can help with both
situations.
For the first situation—plenty of data but no real
information—Apptio has a unique ability to quickly surface,
link, and transform existing domain-managed data (data
managed by specific IT teams) into powerful analytics that
produce enterprisewide insight and value. We can help
you automate the collection of financial, operational, and
business data; identify data correlations through pattern
matching; and present the consolidated data to business
users through self-service and role-based analytics. Some
Apptio customers have quickly linked hundreds of existing
IT and financial data sources and exposed relationships that
yielded incredibly powerful insights in a very short time.
For the second situation—incomplete or inaccurate data—
Apptio can start with a small number of common core data
sets and help you create a roadmap for improving your data
over time. These data sets can include any of the following:
• Financial data
o General ledger (GL)
o Chart of accounts
o Budget data
o Fixed assets register from a system such
as a configuration management database
(CMDB)
o Labor data from a human resources
management system, project and portfolio
management (PPM) system, or service desk
system
o Vendor invoices
• IT operations data
o IT resource tower lists (if available)
o Server assets list
o Storage assets list
• Business services data
o Application lists
o Business services lists (if available)
Apptio can enhance the value of whatever data you have
by creating rate cards and adding industry averages. For
example, here’s a look at how we might work with you to
assemble and enhance existing data:
• Labor. For customers who do not have a
sophisticated time-tracking system, we can create
assumptions around labor and time tracking. It’s
typical, for example, to expend 10 percent of
“The more dirty and fragmented your
data is, the more value you will get
from Apptio.”
Lance Warner, Director of IT Infrastructure,
First American Corporation
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3. Technology Business Management
Top Five Misconceptions About Adopting Technology Business Management
IT labor on tier 1 support and 20 percent on tier 2
support. We can also look at your support ticket data
and extrapolate labor figures from open/close ticket
times, ticket severity, and ticket resolution location.
We can also merge your data with industry averages
and benchmarks to create assumptive costs. Many
customers start with assumptive data and gradually
replace it with actual data as they implement better
time-tracking systems.
• Application-to-infrastructure. We typically find that
most organizations do not have good application-to-
infrastructure mapping. Apptio can help you categorize
your applications by importance to the business
and overall resource consumption. We can help you
calculate the amount of compute and storage resources
that each application consumes and the impact to the
business if it fails. We can add in service-ticket data to
get a good understanding of the application’s support
costs. Based on all this information, we can create
a rate card that can be used to calculate the cost of
running each application. Of course, if you already
have application-to-infrastructure data, we can use
that to deliver even greater cost accuracy.
• Software. Software costs are generally captured
at a high level in a GL or vendor invoicing system.
Apptio can take GL cost pools and map them to the
appropriate infrastructure and applications by using
weightings or actual consumption data from vendor
invoice systems.
It is common for companies to begin with 50 percent real
data and 50 percent assumptive data. Even with a very
small set of initial data, Apptio has helped organizations
gain accurate and actionable cost insights very quickly.
By using our data quality and cleansing reports, we can
give you a roadmap for how to improve your data over
time to help your organization continuously make better
decisions.
One large telecommunications company realized value in
the first two weeks of working with Apptio. The company
had a highly complex IT environment with multiple data
centers, thousands of servers, and dozens of outsourced
providers. Using commonly available data sources—e.g.,
financials on hardware purchases, software licensing,
power and cooling costs, maintenance costs—Apptio
enabled the company to quickly assign costs to all of its
IT elements so that IT and the business could have fact-
based conversations that would drive actionable analysis
of legacy processes.
“To get started with TBM, we provided
data to two different groups: one where
the leader said that they would continue
to use Excel spreadsheets until both
the data and the cost models were 100
percent accurate, and another where the
leader chose to start immediately with the
data and cost models that were available.
The group that started with the available
data realized initial, actionable insights
within a week, and improved the model
and required data as needed over the
following months. However, the group
that waited until the data and models
were 100 percent complete took nearly a
year to get the first actionable insights.”
Rebecca Jacoby, Senior Vice President and Chief
Information Officer, Cisco Systems
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4. Technology Business Management
Top Five Misconceptions About Adopting Technology Business Management
“I don’t have the people or resources required to
undertake TBM.”
You are already expending resources on TBM-related
activities, just not by that name and probably not very
efficiently. Do you have an application rationalization
effort underway? A cloud initiative? Infrastructure as a
service (IaaS) initiative? How many people are involved?
How will you make it repeatable and automated? Apptio
can help you use your existing resources more efficiently
to do even more.
For most organizations, the net addition of resources to
practice TBM is very small, if not net-zero. Undertaking
TBM as a focused discipline can help you automate
manual cost-calculation and data management processes
that your staff is likely engaged in and reduce the time
required for these activities.
Based on our experience, approximately 40 percent of
organizations undertake TBM holistically, to maximize the
value of IT services across their organization. They are
using Apptio to transform into an IT services organization
and/or to eliminate complexity in their IT allocations.
“With Apptio’s Service Costing, we were
able to get our TBM initiative started
quickly and provide quality data to
support accurate cost-saving decisions.
We also use the application for ongoing
operational reviews and analytics to
ensure we are continually improving and
delivering value as a team.”
Christopher Levitt, Chief Financial Officer of IT,
Con-way
However, the remaining 60 percent start using Apptio
TBM to justify one concrete decision—such as moving
to a cloud-computing solution, benchmarking IT costs
relative to those of other business units, or buying a new
storage system—or to produce one specific deliverable
such as a bill of IT. The time-to-value for these discrete-
use cases is typically fewer than three months, and the
resource demands are minimal. These include:
• Half a full-time equivalent (FTE) to serve as a power
user for data modeling and analytics. This individual
is typically a senior analyst who has a background in
data mining and data analytics and the ability to work
collaboratively with finance and IT.
• HalfanFTEtoserveasaTBMprogramofficerleader.This
individual has experience in relationship management,
risk management, financial management, and business
strategy. Their job is to drive the technology business
planning process and provide reports and analysis to
the technology operations team. They also serve as a
liaison with the office of the Chief Information Officer
(CIO) and business units to help drive business value.
• The ongoing involvement of an executive sponsor, such
as a CIO, Chief Financial Officer (CFO), or Vice President
of Infrastructure. This individual’s responsibility is to
implement and realize value from TBM practices as
part of IT’s regular monthly management cadence.
“With Apptio, we spend less time chasing
dataandmoretimeusingdata.Ourbusiness
managers no longer have to accept IT costs
they don’t really understand.”
Jeff Medek, Corporate Business Partner and Former
Director IT Finance, Navistar International Corp.
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5. Technology Business Management
Top Five Misconceptions About Adopting Technology Business Management
• Approximately 10 to 20 hours from the finance and
IT infrastructure teams to provide the initial data, with
diminishing ongoing involvement as data capture is
automated.
Because Apptio is delivered as a software-as-a-
service solution, there are no incremental infrastructure
requirements, in addition to minimal staffing requirements.
Unlike other vendors, Apptio does not require that you
have hundreds of databases or database administrators
with coding and schema creation skills. Additionally, the
learning curve for using Apptio analytical and decision-
support capabilities is minimal, so IT leaders and decision
makers can get up to speed quickly and stay productive.
Lastly, you can start with a focused initiative to prove
value and adapt and evolve your TBM efforts over time to
add more value as you progress.
Time-to-value is critically important to Apptio, because it
is to our customers. We typically see customers making
better business decisions in a matter of months. Within
90 days, one large software company with an annual IT
spend of more than US$2 billion used Apptio software and
services to deliver 400 bills of IT, automate an IT pro forma
invoice for the business, and institute monthly reports that
quantify the value of IT.
The results are just as profound for smaller companies.
Park Nicollet Health Services, a healthcare provider in
Minneapolis, Minnesota, reversed course on a major
technology initiative when Apptio forecasting revealed
that the project would not be cost-effective. The company
also eliminated 24 underutilized applications and halted a
capital investment that Apptio data revealed would require
$370,000 in annual maintenance.
“I have other, higher-priority projects that I need to do
before I start TBM.”
The CIO Magazine 2013 State of the CIO Survey1
indicated
that the top initiatives for CIOs today include:
• Taking action to market IT and to build and solidify
relationships with non-IT stakeholders
• Making investments in business intelligence and
analytics
• Making investments in data management solutions
TBM will help you address each of these initiatives. More
than 150 organizations have already begun with Apptio
TBM, and all had other priorities before beginning this
work. However, all realized that they needed to thoroughly
understand and communicate their IT service costs and
service quality before they could optimize them.
Beyond the ability to help businesses more quickly meet
strategic objectives, Apptio TBM can help you dramatically
improve specific projects and initiatives already underway,
such as:
• Cloud initiatives (determining which workloads to move
to cloud, etc.)
• Vendor optimization
• Server consolidation/virtualization sprawl
• Storage consumption analysis and optimization
“Apptio allows us to rapidly model and
understand the impact of our cloud projects
on cost and performance. As a result, we
have been able to partner more closely
with our business affiliates to align IT with
corporate priorities.”
Don Tierney, Chief Technology Officer, Park Nicollet
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www.cio.com/documents/pdfs/2013%20State%20of%20the%20CIO%20Exec%20Summary.pdf1
6. Technology Business Management
Top Five Misconceptions About Adopting Technology Business Management
• Application consolidation
• Application and infrastructure rationalization
• Business unit/IT alignment and transparency (changing
the IT conversation with the business)
• IT benchmarking
• Budgeting and planning
Remember, you don’t need to go “all in” with TBM. Get
started with one initiative and apply Apptio TBM to it.
“TBM is no different than the insights that I get from my
current financial and IT systems.”
Every enterprise IT shop has a GL system—such as JD
Edwards, PeopleSoft, or SAP—used to track high-level
expenditures. Others have a fixed-asset system and
budgeting system, such as Hyperion, used to provide
other specialized financial functions. These systems do a
great job of tracking the costs of IT at the general ledger or
departmental level, but they do not translate cost views into
IT product/service and business-unit consumption views.
This is what Apptio enables you to do.
Think about how you use applications such as SAP, Oracle
financials, enterprise resource planning, and process control
systems. These are not single applications but aggregations
of multiple operational systems. The benefit of these
systems comes from their ability to integrate and reconcile
the inputs of many systems. Prior to Apptio TBM, there
was no comparable application for IT. In much the same
way that SAP provides insights about your business that
you cannot get by looking at standalone logistics, demand
management, materials planning, and inventory systems,
Apptio provides insights that you cannot get by looking at
standalone financial, time-tracking, project management,
and IT operational systems.
While existing financial and IT systems typically do a good
job of helping to efficiently allocate resources, TBM will help
you efficiently utilize these same resources. In addition to
knowing what you spend, TBM will help you understand what
you should be spending on. Further, Apptio TBM uniquely
enables IT leaders to rapidly and accurately respond and
adapt to the market-driven demands of the business, like
changes to business priorities
Apptio uniquely delivers four capabilities required to deliver
TBM purpose-built for IT:
• Adaptive data management – the ability to extract,
transform, and correlate raw data and easily integrate
new or changed data sources
• Visual cost and usage modeling – the ability to visually
model cost, utilization, service levels, business unit
consumption, and customer profitability of all IT
products and services
• Self-service analytics – the ability to enable real-time
cost calculations and data exploration
• IT best practices – the ability to immediately apply
best practices from hundreds of IT leaders to your
organization
“I don’t know how to build a business case around TBM.”
We can help you develop a business case for TBM based on
best practices and the knowledge gleaned through driving
hundreds of millions of dollars of value back to our customers.
You will find that once you bring TBM into your organization,
you will quickly be able to understand the business value of
every program, product, service, and initiative and articulate
that to your business peers.
Your IT organization is already making the decisions and
performing the analyses that we call TBM. But TBM as a
discipline adds rigor, process, and best practices to make the
analyses and decisions more reliable, fact-based, transparent,
and repeatable. TBM provides a substantial improvement—
sometimes a massive one—over how you are currently making
decisions to manage IT. This gain is often so great that it enables
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7. Technology Business Management
Top Five Misconceptions About Adopting Technology Business Management
you to perform analyses and undertake initiatives that you
simply would not have attempted before—not because they
were impossible but because the level of effort was prohibitive.
Apptio TBM is an enabler, amplifier, and accelerator. Although
much of what we do could be done manually with enough time
and effort, Apptio:
• Captures, correlates, and manages vast quantities
of frequently changing financial and operational data
that would require too much time, effort, and constant
rework to manage using spreadsheets or business
intelligence tools.
• Quickly exposes insights and (often significant)
optimization opportunities that previously could only
be identified through building elaborate, custom-built
models and reports.
• Provides transparency into data, relationships, and
resource allocation choices, which enables fact-based
conversations about performance and priorities rather
than squabbles about data integrity.
• Leverages purpose-built reporting and analytics,
based on best practices from more than 150 Apptio
customers, to save time and effort in performing
regular day-to-day and month-to-month reporting and
analysis tasks.
• Enables modeling “what-if” scenarios based on
definitive “live” data to understand the potential impact
of decisions.
Apptio can enable big savings on specific projects, such as
storage replatforming, IT service management, and CMDB
creation. But the even bigger value of TBM is in how it helps
you execute big transformational projects, such as IaaS,
cloud computing, and big-data analytics.
Apptio enables the CIO to not only measure and manage
his or her business but deliver the organizational analytics
to measure and manage each area of the IT environment in
the context of shifting business priorities. We can help you
understand the true cost of the IT services you’re delivering,
who is consuming them, and how they’re being paid for.
Apptio helps you ensure that your limited staff and dollars
are being dedicated to the highest-priority projects. Should
these priorities change, Apptio analytics and “what if”
capabilities enable you to quickly identify alternative courses
of action.
CONCLUSION
With more pressure than ever on IT organizations to build
trusted relationships with their non-IT stakeholders and
every IT investment under an ROI microscope, CIOs
need to get started today with Technology Business
Management. Hundreds of respected enterprises—
including Boeing, Microsoft, Cisco, JP Morgan Chase,
Bank of America, Con-way, and Navistar—are using
Apptio solutions and services to drive accountability,
increase information fidelity, and strategically align IT with
the business.
Contact us today at www.apptio.com/company/contact
to begin a discussion about how Apptio TBM can deliver
rapid value in your organization.
Apptio is the leading independent provider of on-demand Technology
Business Management (TBM) solutions for managing the business of
IT. Apptio enables IT leaders to manage the cost, quality, and value of
IT Services by providing deep visibility into the total cost of IT services,
communicating the value of IT to the business, and strategically
aligning the planning, budgeting, and forecasting processes. Apptio’s
TBM solutions play a critical role in helping companies accelerate IT
investmentdecisions,cloudinitiatives,strategicsourcingimprovements,
and other key business initiatives. Global enterprise customers rely on
Apptio® products and services to reduce costs and align IT with business
priorities. For more information, visit the Apptio website or the Apptio
blog at www.apptio.com.
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