Generating Value From IT Cost Transparency and Cost Optimization Initiatives

It’s not enough to talk the talk when it comes to IT cost transparency initiatives – can you and your IT team also walk the walk?

Increasingly, the C-level, senior executives, and boards are demanding that their corporate IT teams deliver not only more services, but also with greater efficiency and cost optimization. In a business sector already full of buzzwords, talk of “cost transparency” and “cost optimization initiatives” rules the day.

With technology advances accelerating at an ever-increasing pace, CIOs and their teams will weigh benefits and investments of internal and external technology delivery mechanisms for optimizing the delivery of technology to meet corporate business objectives with complete cost transparency.

Understanding these concepts – or even taking tentative steps to implement them – is one thing. Doing it with a laser-like focus on best practices is something else altogether.

What do those cost optimization and cost transparency best practices look like? Key elements should include:

• Formal, documented change management processes for IT financial management
• Developing a published rate card for all IT products and services and communicated to all internal business-unit management
• Ongoing communication of chargeback policies to organization, executed against a formal communications plan
• Provide an accurate mock ‘showback’ invoice to business unit managers during the transition to complete technology cost transparency. Establish rates for a pre-determined period of time such as a fiscal year, rather than fluctuating monthly
• Use enabling technology that can standardize the IT cost transparency process across the organization, rather than home-grown solutions like Excel spreadsheets and Access databases.

Want to learn more? The Real Business of IT from Harvard Press is a must-read for CIO teams, CEOs and CFOs facing the challenge of managing enterprise IT expenses. More than just buzzwords, the march to complete and accurate IT cost transparency has the capacity to drive real, sustained savings for enterprises while optimizing costs and communicating the value of technology use to meet strategic business objectives.