The High Value CMDB

In this session, we’ll cover the techniques used to properly and consistently assess the financial and business benefits of a technology investment. We’ll review the tools used to build a financial business case and examine the strengths and weaknesses of metrics such as ROI, TCO, NPV, and Payback. We’ll look at the challenges of credibly estimating direct and indirect benefits, and outline a straight-forward process for estimating indirect benefits.

Most people in IT entered the profession due to their interest and proficiency in technology. Not yet many IT practitioners set out to be accountants or marketers – although we constantly send out messages that state the need for skills in these areas.

There are more and more examples of accountants (or people from an accountancy, financial and other backgrounds) working in IT and there is a real need for commercial and financial skills and experience in this area.

The changing role and position of technology, the growth of managed services and the emergence of SIAM (Service Integration and Management) are driving the need for a new set of capabilities and competencies in IT and the management of technology. Clearly this presents a number of challenges for IT organisations and professionals alike – many of whom do not see themselves as being ‘bean counters’ or accountants…

This session examines the following:

What are the new challenges for IT?
What skills are needed?
What roles and responsibilities are required?
How can ‘traditional’ IT people and enterprise IT organisations adapt to meet these challenges?
What does the IT industry and e.g. enterprise of the future look like?

One of the significant changes resulting from the current economic climate has been the level of external scrutiny applied to IT initiatives. CFOs are demanding comprehensive business cases that can both articulate the value that IT brings to a business and withstand vetting by financial analysts. This session will integrate traditional financial models with business value metrics in order to provide an understandable vehicle for obtaining approval for IT Initiatives. Learn how to quantify financial costs and benefits in order to bridge the gap between what a CIO wants and what a CFO needs to justify the IT investment.

In today’s business environment, CIO’s are facing enormous pressure to drive value from their IT budgets and maximize investments to drive innovation.

Any ROI or cost benefit analysis requires well documented use cases that are not summarized in a single report, but rather a series of steps outlined to capture value. ROI or cost benefit analysis should be a process that is prescriptive and proactive – not an afterthought.

This session explores the following four common use cases that justify the IT Financial Management Implementation and shows attendees where to find value and revenue as well as where there is waste and hidden cost savings.

1. IT Portfolio Optimization and Cloud – show me the value
2. IT Financial Management for Application and Support Rationalization – show me the money
3. Data Center Consolidation and Transformation – show me the waste & the big bucks
4. Servers, Storage and Desktops Delivers Tangible Savings – show me the hidden cost of savings

The Fab Four in use cases are key measures of success that demonstrate the value to both IT and the organization. The session will provide attendees with the framework to establish these key measures for success in their organizations and gain insight into a better process for data collection, synthesis of the data, costing and the planning that is required.

In the average organization, finances are typically tracked by functional groupings or IT units, for example server or network costs. This view may be helpful to a CIO or the head of those units but provides little value to the business. It contributes to the view of IT as a “black hole” – money goes in but nothing comes out. This webinar looks at service-based Financial Management and the benefits of accounting and budgeting that can be tied back directly to business outcomes. This form of financial management enables the business to understand the costs and value of a particular service, say Inventory Management services in a retail chain. It also enables IT to have meaningful service reviews with the business, by transforming bits and bytes into dollars and “sense”.

Technology Business Management (TBM) provides a practical, applied discipline for technology leaders and their business partners to collaborate on business-aligned decisions. Developed by thoughtleading CIOs and CTOs from The Coca-Cola Company, Goldman Sachs, DIRECTV, Microsoft, Cisco, Xerox and more, TBM defines core disciplines and decision-making capabilities, such as cost transparency, demand-based planning, cost optimization, and portfolio rationalization. In this workshop, Todd Tucker, Research Director for the TBM Council, will share how to use the TBM Index™ to benchmark your organization, compare it against industry peers, and create a roadmap based on your current state and business goals.

Attendees will learn:
* How innovative technology leaders leverage Technology Business Management to improve value delivery
* How to interpret TBM Index results, including peer group comparisons, to shape your roadmap
* The operational cadence for TBM, including key reports for sustaining and communicating optimizations

The demands from our business partners for business technology, business services and IT services are continuously expanding! This is nothing new as there always was an appetite for new technology and services; however in the age of the customer where customer loyalty and empowered customers have lots of choices, IT organizations need (and some are) rethinking on how to better partner with the business teams. The challenges for IT are how to continue managing the existing environment and balance this with investments and innovations given that the IT budgets between now and 2016 stay relatively flat. IT organizations have always “done finance” in some shape or form. So the question to IT organizations and executives is not “Are you doing IT financial management?” but rather “How mature is your IT financial management?”

In this session Eveline Oehrlich, Forrester’s Research Director and VP, IT Operations is sharing some of Forrester’s thinking relative to the topic of IT Financial management. Additionally, she has invited two panel members with whom she will explore their maturity relative to their IT financial management initiatives.

Disruptive new technologies such as mobility and the cloud fundamentally change how IT is measured and managed.

In this session, we will discuss how IT can fully determine the cost of services for use as a comparison or for chargeback or show-back and how IT can be more transparent with the business value being provided by their services.

In the past, IT organizations could simply cross-charge their costs and report on service-level agreements (SLAs). Today, business customers can go to Amazon, Azure or other providers’ web pages and see prices for servers, storage, databases and more as well as seeing performance metrics for those services.

This means that, for the first time, IT needs to have public cloud-comparable costs for service options and transparent performance information. By doing this, IT can generate a cost-effective strategy that improves operating efficiency while embracing the cloud, whether public or private or a hybrid.

Key take-aways from attending this session are:
- Understand what are the 'top-5' mistakes IT professionals make on financial cases and the consequences
- How can you avoid making the 'top-5' killer mistakes?
- Proven, successful techniques to build strong financial cases that are readily implementable by IT professionals
- Case study examples of good & bad practice
- Tools, templates & techniques to take away and can be uses immediately
- Expert Q&A session on your specific issues, barriers and challenges