Moving Up the Maturity Curve Around IT Financial Discipline

Depending on what your school experience was like, you may have loved – or dreaded – being graded on a curve. Today, a far less forgiving curve is in play for enterprise IT departments, and where your organization lands on it can mean millions of dollars in savings – or unnecessary expenditures. The arc in question is the fiscal maturity curve, and it tracks financial discipline around the delivery of technology.

Despite technological advances, the tools and processes around cost recovery and reporting for IT technology consumption and utilization have remained essentially static over the years. Organizations may have evolved from paper files to spreadsheets and corporate budgeting and planning solutions, but none of these provide the level of detail needed for true financial transparency. However, a new IT financial and business management (ITFBM) solution brings greater control and visibility to IT finance and business management and helps organizations advance the maturity curve around IT financial discipline.

Organizations taking a best-practices approach to ITFBM can allow for more than just running the business. With greater visibility and control, organizations can ensure appropriate resources are allocated to revenue-generating activities and that investments align with business goals. Advancing along the maturity curve of ITFBM requires a focused technology solution combined with best-in-class expertise, helping organizations increase rigor around financial discipline and the delivery of technology.

With a mature ITFBM solution, the enterprise IT organization has access to accurate data and a roadmap to reach a state of alignment with the rest of the business – the “Holy Grail” for today’s CIO. Senior management, business divisions and even individual departments all gain deep transparency into the cost of their IT consumption. And, detailed ROI for IT expenditure is no longer a matter of mystery, but one of objective and accurate reporting.

Delivering on the promise of robust ITFBM requires a total-solution approach rather than a focus on just the software purchase. Given the need for a best-practices approach across multiple industries and environments, software-as-a-service (SaaS) implementation and a partner who provides comprehensive support is the most efficient way for an enterprise to capture that expertise without an expensive increase in staffing. Together, those two elements — a deep bench of specialized, consultative business-process expertise and SaaS implementation to improve flexibility while reducing roll-out costs – define a mature, value-added ITFBM solution.

Moving up the fiscal-maturity curve isn’t an option for today’s IT organization – it’s an imperative. Given the potentially game-changing effects (and straight-to-the-bottom-line savings) of optimized IT spending, a move up the curve – to business-aligned IT expenditures and deep cost transparency – can deliver competitive advantage.