Technology Business Management – The CIOs Business Management System

  • Colin Rowland, VP of EMEA at Apptio

  • 07.06.2016 11:41 am

In today’s unstable economy CIOs are struggling with numerous challenges in the effort to increase profits for businesseswith very stringent budgets. This market turbulence requires CIOs to have a holistic view of their IT strategy, all expenses and costs, the overall profitability of the project as well as the ability to communicate all these important facts to the c –suite level of the organization for effective decision making. Apptio developed a Technology Business Management (TBM) cloud-based softwarethat allows CIOs to run IT like a business and navigate more efficiently through a complicated infrastructure. Colin Rowland, VP of EMEA at Apptio, is sharing his expert opinion with the readers of Financial IT on current challenges in IT resource management and cloud economics, while giving his vision of how CIOs can add more value to the business with the proper tools at hand.  

“I think it is very important for every business to understand the cost of their products throughout the whole cycle including production, supply chain and delivery to the customers,” starts Rowland. “Apptio built the solution for CIOs so that they can truly understand the cost of their services, how to make better decisions, and how to bring value both to the customers and business. Moreover, how to reflect these values for effective strategy in infrastructure, operations or vendor management.”   

 In fact, Apptio pioneered the Technology Business Management (TBM) discipline and became one of the first providers on the market to offer a Software as a Service (SaaS) TBM solution. Today more than 40 percent of the Fortune 100 companies use Apptio to boost the lacking business visibility into technology spend.       

“CIOs want to add more value to the business and ultimately become business leaders rather than technologists. So in order to empower better business decisions they need a business management solution to calculate the fair market cost of aservice, its value for the customers, competitiveness and relevance to the overall business strategy of the organization. We help CIOs to be in control of their own destinies and become business leaders rather than technologists.”

“We’ve seen the digital market explode over the last few years,” continues Rowland. “And a new economy is being created through digitization, whether it’s at the storefront or in the supply chain. On the customers’ side in particular, CEOs are becoming more demanding of what CIOs have to deliver, not so much about how to reduce your cost base in IT but how you can influence more revenue without capital boost. In most cases, CEOs are expecting the results from CIOs with budget constraints. This means that CIOs have to look much closer at their own cost base and find the ways to remove costs from running tochanging the business and at the same time develop the value of service. With the help of thoughtful resource planning and comprehensive business management solutions, CIOs are empowered to relieve that tension on c- suite and deliver more revenue for the projects.”      

As enterprise adoption of public cloud continues to rapidly grow, cloud solution providers often lure businesses inwith the ease of use, without regard forunderstanding the actual costs. Furthermore, cloud is fundamentally changing the capital and operating models for IT. Understanding these economics and efficiencies is quite complex, especially since many enterprises tend to use multiple vendors, which makes decision support even more important since.Each organization has their own approach to cloud adoption and therefore should understand their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for cloud alongside all other IT investments. Apptio therefore becomes the economic decision point for cloud adoption. No IT leader dreams of adopting the cloud without first considering the security implications; the same should be true of the economic impact of the cloud. With Apptio, IT is empowered to control the cost, utilization and value of the cloud to make good business decisions.

“Clearly there is a move to migrate many of the CIOs’ workloads to the cloud. But the stumbling point is CIOs need a more holistic view on how much the organizations are spending on the cloud. And that’s what many CIOs ask us to help with - transparency and overall view on spending in their use of cloud based technology. Yes, cloud can be more agile with lower costs. But quite often organizations are not looking at the whole cost of what it takes to support the cloud. In some cases cloud migrations turn out to be more expensive for the organization then when they were running it for themselves before.”  

 

 

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