Optimizing Cost with IT Cost Transparency

According to a study conducted by International Data Group, enterprises on average $3.5M will invest in cloud apps, platforms, and services this year.

Almost all enterprises are now shifting towards digital business model and deploying IT-based resources for optimizing their business productivity. Servers, routers and other assets are processing, recording, classifying and summarizing business data for interpretation and management decision-making. But having IT assets in your organization is one thing and getting it on the right path is another. Though IT, simplifies and fasten your business growth, you may end up with business inefficiencies with inadequate knowledge of the resources.

In this time where almost every company has to be a tech company, an important question arises- How do you drive your IT towards your business goals?

With most of the operations now depending on the IT infrastructure, CIOs find it difficult to optimize and devise frameworks for long-term financial changes in their organization.

IT Cost Transparency:

The first step towards reducing cost and ensuring IT, operations are focused on goals, organizations need to make all IT-related activity costs transparent. They need to track their total assets and their cost required to deliver and maintain the IT services.

IT cost transparency is an IT management software and system that enables organizations to model and track the total cost to deliver and maintain the IT services. IT cost transparency solutions provide complete budgeting and financial overview of the organization.  It tracks utilization, usage, and operational performance metrics of the available resources in order to measure ROI (Return on Investment).

Simplified IT management for CIOs:

IT Cost transparency solutions offers detailed, information about the cost of providing applications and services. With this information, CIOs (Chief Information Officers) can make faster and fact-based decisions about IT related purchases. The primary goal of these systems is to help CIOs effectively and openly discuss budget allocations with all the business personnel. Now, IT departments can make educated decisions because they know where the money is spent with the data exposed via cost transparency.

How Does Cost Transparency Help in Business Cost Optimization and Innovations?

1. Gives a complete view of the money:

IT cost transparency focuses on the following views to support the efforts of CIOs to successfully run an IT business:

• Asset-based view of the enterprise including its hardware, software, personnel and external services.
• The technical view of servers, and networks. It enables CIOs to benchmark the IT resources
• Business services view which helps in communicating the cost of the IT services to business people and other nontechnical people
• Investment view which simplifies identification and tracking of investments in new capabilities and the amount spent on running the business.

2. IT leveraging competence:

IT leveraging competence means the ability to effectively use IT functionalities. Business units can build a competitive advantage with IT leveraging competence. A huge benefit of IT cost transparency for IT leaders is the ability to have more leverage. It gives them the confidence to communicate the reasons behind costs and their overall value to the company. Now, non-IT leaders can understand and analyze hypothetical scenarios to plan for new project ROI.

3. Helps in making fact-based decisions:

Technology is rapidly evolving. With thousands of products in the market, you can easily end up buying inefficient or costly networking equipment. IT Cost transparency provides a detailed look at redundancies and inaccuracies with a simplified and automated collection of key cost drivers. It clarifies expenses and breakdown budget into labor, software, hardware and service provider charges. This can have a huge impact on the decisions among the stakeholders.

4. Benchmarking IT Costs:

To find out whether an IT organization is cost-effective and spending the right amounts towards business goals, benchmarking is important. IT cost transparency solutions comes with the ability to track operational metrics such as utilization, service levels cost and support tickets. It provides additional financial transparency. By incorporating effective benchmarking into the annual planning process, organizations can identify areas of opportunity that need to be addressed.

5. Change in Behavior:

With a transparent cost model, executives have the ability to see how their employees affect consumption and how teams are performing.  With custom reporting and analysis of unit cost drivers, CIOs can increase engagement and reduce unnecessary costs. Cost is regularly reviewed and trended, therefore cost transparency can influence employees to notice services and software that isn’t beneficial.

Conclusion:

Gaining business insights is the very first step to optimize cost models. CIOs strategize and facilitate these improvements within the organization. To device efficient cost reduction model, performance metrics are required to indicate whether the IT resources “are running on time and on the right track”.  IT cost transparency aids the enterprise with values communicated properly and through a constant feedback loop. It simplifies budgeting and keeps business initiatives on track. With simplified cost matrices, a business can gain new insights and make educated risks for expandability. Ultimately, an IT cost transparency solution can become a catalyst for a positive change throughout your organization.

Contact us today to learn about Bleuwire™  services and solutions in how we can help your business.