Getting Answers to the Technology Question of What If

Let’s face it, IT professionals have a tough job. We are well aware you hold many responsibilities, not just “keeping the lights on” but also supplying your organization with the technology needed to continuously innovate and remain ahead of the competition, while minimizing costs. But the challenges in achieving this are numerous, from understanding the total cost of ownership of the applications and solutions you deliver and identifying areas for cost savings, to ensuring your organization’s overall technology platform is fully optimized.

So what can you do to ensure your IT Financial Management (ITFM) is successful? For one, the ability to predict how different scenarios and circumstances impact unit costs will enable your organization to operate more effectively and better understand the cost drivers associated with delivering IT products and services. But to get to this state, your organization must be able to leverage the actionable metrics and analytics that can lead to cost reduction opportunities. Do you have visibility access to actionable metrics? Equipped with this level of insight, IT professionals like you can gain the crucial information needed to perform “what if?” analysis and modeling that will lead to cost optimization.

Essential to the success of this strategy is having multi-version capabilities for budgeting and forecasting service costing and chargeback models. This enables you to perform multiple “what if?” analyses to assess the impact that different objectives and business requirements have on costing models, unit rates and on the overall line of business. With this ability, you and your IT team can better understand the unit costs of your solutions and benchmark those against industry peers and emerging technologies. As such, you can make better informed and more strategic decisions about your company’s technology portfolio.

ComSci, Upland Software’s IT Financial Management solution, fully understands the need to be able to perform extensive “what if?” analyses to ensure technology optimization. For many organizations, the ability to perform “what if?” analysis and compare different scenarios can only be performed as a separate activity to service costing and billing. ComSci built the necessary tools directly into its core technology, enabling you to start “what if?” analysis as soon as your monthly financial process has started. Our comprehensive ITFM solutions give you the capability to run a “production version” of the chargeback processing based on planned product rates. At the same time, you can benefit from maintaining a shadow process to better understand the chargeback impacts on actual unit costs. Moreover, with real-time benchmarking and fixed vs. variable cost analytics, you will be able to compare the total cost of ownership (TCO) of your current infrastructure costs compared to alternative solutions, like cloud computing or virtualization, to achieve ongoing cost optimization for the long term.

As the challenges of conducting successful ITFM continue, you must be able to accurately forecast and budget technology expenses, and ensure your organization invests in solutions that help drive profitable growth. Integral to meeting this goal is the ability to perform comprehensive “what if?” modeling that enables you to see how different scenarios will impact costs. ComSci provides the tools that facilitate this process, helping you not only find answers to your biggest technology questions but also see exactly what you need to update or change. In the end, transparency is ultimately what drives profitability. ComSci ensures you have the right technology and services at the right cost at the right time.