Several years ago, I met with a CIO from a financial company. During our meeting, he told me that his organization was spending 160 million dollars in communications (IT, technology, and telecom). Of that total, $16-20 million was spent with zero visibility. They knew they were spending the money, but they had no idea where it was going. They wanted more transparency on costs, and wanted control over their inventory. This is the type of problem that together, ITFM and TEM can help solve. Reaping the benefits of combining Telecom Expense Management (TEM) and IT Financial Management (ITFM) is the 91 reason to go beyond telecom expense management.
ITFM
IT Financial Management (ITFM), is all about knowing your service costs and who is consuming them. Think of all the services used throughout the enterprise, from data centers, cloud services and IT services. ITFM provides you with deep visibility of indirect and direct costs to make better decisions. Our ITFM solution, Upland Comsci, provides you with the ability to improve budgeting, optimize costs, and enables collaborative planning, and see the true cost of delivering IT.
TEM
TEM, Telecom Expense Management, focuses on telecom, mobility and unified communications, which comprise about 50% of all global IT spending, according to Gartner. TEM looks at assets, contracts, usage data, and licenses, across the enterprise from an inventory and tracking perspective. TEM will tell you what assets you have, where they are located, and how they are being used. TEM is complementary to ITFM in that they both enable cost optimization and allocation. In a nutshell TEM tracks more of the day-to-day activities and granular details associated with costs whereas ITFM covers the more of the broader subject of spend.
ITFM and TEM working together
ITFM and TEM together have a singular end goal – giving you better value and providing you with the ability to make better decisions for budget, investment, and spending. Together, ITFM and TEM provide you with an all encompassing and a singular view of your IT usage and finance throughout the enterprise. ITFM and TEM give you the information that enables you to focus on running your business.
How do I get started with ITFM and/or TEM?
Whether you have decided to start with ITFM or TEM as your primary solution, often these two paths merge together. TEM solutions look more specifically at a deeper dive into telecom and IT assets and data. If your challenge is understanding high amounts of transactional operations and data throughout the month, TEM might be your starting point. An ITFM solution focuses on all the service deliverables from IT and their costs. ITFM can pull all the data that TEM has collected to look across all your IT assets, manage your budgets and get a better understanding of all your costs. If you already have an ITFM solution in place to manage your budget, implementing a TEM solution, such as Cimpl, can provide your organization with a more focused view on specific costs and assignment of communication services.
