Becoming business centric is a key part of the mission of many IT organizations. The question is how to achieve this lofty goal. This Gartner research paper looks at the core capabilities necessary to achieve that goal.
Business centric IT. What does it take?
Most IT organizations are in some form of transition, from a world where they were the only source of IT services to one where they are part of a larger IT ecosystem where some percentage of IT services are now being delivered by 3rd party SaaS or public cloud providers. As IT’s role evolves from being simply a provider of services to being a provider and a broker of IT services the need to provide transparency into the cost and quality of IT services is increasing. This capability is fundamental to becoming a more business centric IT organization.
The “Business-Centric CIO” paper leverages Gartner research to look at the key capabilities required to provide this increased level of financial transparency. These capabilities include the ability to:
- Track and manage all IT costs at a service level
- Model the impact on the cost of services for proposed IT initiatives
- Present LOB with a detailed “bill-of-IT” that represents actual consumption
- Benchmark internal costs against industry and like complexity peers
- Analyze the cost and composition of IT labor
- Track and manage a portfolio of IT projects
- Manage vendor performance against contract
- Integrate service level metrics alongside financial data to support cost/quality trade-offs
- Effectively track and manage assets
Achieving business centricity with VMware
VMware IT Business Management Suite can help improve business IT alignment and accelerate IT transformation by delivering complete transparency into the costs and quality of all IT services. The comprehensive solution includes all of the key capabilities—visualization, integrated management, automation, and extensibility—required to support “running IT like a business.” With the exception of tracking assets, the VMware IT Business Suite directly addresses all of the capabilities called for in this Gartner Research paper. In the case of assets, while VMware IT Business Management doesn’t directly manage your assets it does leverage asset information as part of the process of modeling all IT costs in a service context.
On the VMware IT Business Management Suite resource page you will find several videos highlighting how help address the requirements called for in the Gartner paper. Specifically there are short videos that address our capabilities in the following areas:
- Tracking and managing costs from a service perspective
- Presenting a “Bill-of-IT” to line-of-business owners
- Managing Service Level Metrics
If you need help addressing your IT service costing and quality management initiative, contact us and our experts will help your team build the business case and the solution to maximize your IT productivity.
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