Since IT is the backbone of most business functions, technology investments represent a growing percentage of corporate spending. Mid-sized companies (between $50 million – $2 billion in revenue) spend 4.1% of revenue on IT, on average. That means, for example, a $1B company spends roughly $41 million on hardware, software, and services each year.
As a result, optimizing IT investments has become a top business priority. IT departments need to demonstrate the value they bring, and it is more important than ever to “run IT like a business.”
IT departments need to optimize costs – for example, by eliminating duplicate or underused services and to accurately forecast future costs. They need to account for all IT devices and services, and present showbacks or chargebacks to each business unit, to gain transparency and trust.
Achieving full transparency of IT expenses is an ongoing challenge. Excel spreadsheets are a good way to get started managing IT finances. But as business needs and data complexity increase over time, spreadsheets become incredibly difficult to manage. They can be error-prone, which negatively impacts data integrity, as well as your credibility. Not to mention, the manual nature of managing IT finances in Excel is extremely time-consuming.
Where are you on the financial management maturity curve?
When the capability of Excel no longer meets the needs of the IT organization, a more powerful tool is needed. An ITFM solution will automate manual processes, eliminate the errors that occur with the manual nature of using spreadsheets, and provide full visibility to an organization’s IT costs.
Your organization is probably ripe for IT financial management (ITFM) software or technology business management (TBM) software when you find that:
- You have multiple linked spreadsheets with upwards of 20 tabs each
- Your analysts are spending 75% of their time manually transforming and manipulating data in spreadsheets and only 25% of their time analyzing data and communicating it back to your internal clients
- It’s a challenge uncovering duplicate services and who’s using what
When you implement ITFM/TBM software, you bring all your financial and operational data under one roof. You’ll gain full financial transparency of all IT expenses and identify the true cost of ownership of your applications. What’s more, through consolidated reporting, you’ll gain valuable data insights right out of the gate.
We find that when organizations adopt ComSci ITFM/TBM software, their analysts are able to spend 80% of their time analyzing data and sharing it with business units through easy-to-understand reports, rather than spending their time on Excel spreadsheets.
Gain a virtual outsourced team
As IT departments are being asked to do more with less, ComSci further eases the burden on IT teams by providing a dedicated Managed Services team of ITFM/TBM experts to perform all back-office functions and serve as a trusted advisor. We will:
- Collect data from all vendors
- Run the data through your business rules
- Generate reports that indicate P&L, which business units are spending the most, where you’re losing money, and so on
- Talk with your peers and industry analysts and advise on benchmarks and unit rates
- Perform health checks
- Recommend best practices for running IT as a business
- Meet with you regularly to advise you on best practices and how to optimize financial management of IT services
Companies are increasingly moving toward managed services to improve efficiencies and free up IT resources.
Using ComSci ITFM software, you’ll be able to present a comprehensive bill of services, eliminate duplicate services, optimize and rationalize your application portfolio and costs, and make better decisions – not to mention ditch the Excel spreadsheet and free up your resources.
Contact us to learn how ComSci can help you demonstrate value to your organization.