FINAL WORD
Tarun Kumar Kalra , Regional Vice President ,
Asia , Apptio working in 100 subsidiaries and associated companies across 24 countries .
KPMG and Apptio worked with the company corporation to configure the conglomerate ’ s existing systems . They matched how consumption of services , budgeted consumption , trend reporting and variance analysis would be managed , before implementing a digital chargeback management system . that needs good management practices to align key stakeholders , so that data then becomes easy to collect and analyze . Key success factors include identifying an executive to champion TBM across the organization and to create a transparent organizational culture .
To help Asia ’ s business leaders understand what is required of them , the TBM Council APAC launched its presence in Singapore last October . The Council offers certification courses to senior IT leaders and finance managers who want to run a successful Technology Business Management ( TBM ) program .
Greater transparency and accountability leading to quick benefits
Even if companies have only just begun to use TBM , almost a quarter of them report that they have used it to optimize spending on vendor contracts . Institutions that have deployed TBM solutions have derived significant funding improvements within 90 days and in some cases , as few as 30 days . As a result , globally , customers are likely to have achieved an eight-fold return on their investment , taking an average of eight months to break even .
Another point to note is that companies discover that as their TBM maturity increases , it positively impacts the level of trust that business partners have with the company ’ s technology department . These benefits become most apparent when they have already developed advanced reporting and analytics and TBM has become an integral part of how they plan and operate .
Sometimes TBM just turns what was previously a challenging morass into a natural process flow . In Singapore , an engineering group wanted to digitize its complex and manual IT chargeback process . It had to analyze the existing business structure and chargeback rules set for 20,000 global employees ,
Using TBM to do this provided a framework for this matching , literally converting the dollars and cents of chargeback management to the value the service brought to the company , giving enough accountability for the IT division to be fiscally responsible .
Using data to make decisions and drive growth
Given the benefits , it may not be surprising that 60 % of the Fortune 100 companies choose to use TBM solutions .
Unilever , one of the world ’ s best-known consumer goods companies , managed their technology costs centrally and allocated them using a formula based on turnover . Unfortunately , an estimated 80 % of their IT cost was considered a ‘ black box ’ with no visibility of how cost was spent and could not be related to the value returned .
Their decision to use TBM and Apptio helped Unilever create accountability through granular real-time reporting . The situation was flipped around so that now almost 80 % of their costs were completely identifiable to an application or a service . In the process , they gained Total Cost of Ownership ( TCO ) visibility into more than 70 % of their services .
This has allowed them to gain greater confidence when deciding on future IT strategy . “ We still own two big data centers but we are now looking to write those off as well , saving about € 50 million ,” said José Silva , Unilever VP , IT Shared Services . “ We started that program two months ago and the only way to accelerate that was based on the data from Apptio .”
Done correctly , TBM helps CIOs ditch the guesswork and manual cost monitoring . It empowers CIOs to make business decisions alongside leaders who understand the company ’ s overall vision , by providing real-time insights in their IT spend against the context of a company ’ s overall KPIs .
This is exactly the kind of data-driven insight that companies need now in the short-term as they make IT purchasing decisions to build a solid base for the next few years of growth . p
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