itSMF Bulletin December 2021 | Page 7

This will help IT teams link their service to profit creation or maximization. Comprehensive financial information also allows businesses to obtain the appropriate budget to deliver a new service or justify the expansion of support teams.

Service cost tracking is often the missing link between IT service quality and business value

Most IT organizations can report on IT service quality and detail IT budgets along departmental or asset lines, but ideally, the IT service management (ITSM) application should also be able to provide senior management with an overview of the cost of each service that the organization makes available to its employees. These services are, after all, the tools that the employees rely on to be successful, and a lot of money is spent on them. In practice, it often proves

difficult, if not impossible, to extract the actual cost of each individual service from existing systems. And this is where effective service cost tracking can help.

Effective service cost tracking bridges the gap

Effective service cost tracking in your ITSM/ESM solution can bridge the great divide between IT service and corporate finance. For cost tracking to be effective, it should provide you with accurate real-time information on a per-service basis and provide business leaders with a complete overview of all the services they make available and how much each of them costs.

Service Cost Tracking: How to Capture Enterprise Service Costs and Provide Actionable Management Reporting.