In the “new normal” of nonstop, intense, worldwide competition, IT is in the bull’s-eye for cost-cutting and accountability initiatives. That’s why senior management needs a full understanding of how much the CIO is spending and what benefits the business is getting for its investment. Without the right level of detail, IT management doesn’t have enough information to determine which IT services could be provided more efficiently through outsourcing, on-demand services, or the cloud.
However, managing, understanding, and delivering all the data related to IT spending requires far more detailed and integrated information about assets, applications, projects, and IT services spending than what’s available from most corporate financial enterprise resource planning (ERP)systems. Therefore, it’s critical to consider how integrated technology can provide service costing, financial planning, and budgeting data.
When ER P Is NotEnough
It’s only natural for a CIO to assume that an ERP system can provide the integrated and detailed information needed about IT costs and benefits, especially after he or she has spent millions of dollars to implementit. However, we’ve seen far too many companies try this and fail, and wind up turning to spreadsheets or an integrated solution rather than an ERP system.
In many companies, the IT organization has far greater need to track capital assets and operating expenses than other business units. Every server, storage array, and network switch represents a capital asset that must be amortized over time. Sometimes, software is also a capital expense,requiring the tracking of different types of licenses for different classes of users using various modules within multiple software packages. All of these expenses are, of course, accounted for within broad entries in the ERP system. However, they are often not recorded at the level of detail or in the context needed to track and manage those resources, or they aren’t described in away that allows IT managers to link those line item expenditures with the kinds of processes and activities managed by IT.
Most ERP systems, particularly when used for finance and accounting, record the spending for servers, storage arrays, or networkswitches under the broad line-item category “total cost of hardware.” They do not provide a way to link specific physical assets to a line item in the budgetor to the depreciation schedule for those assets within the financial fixed-asset area of the accounting application. Therefore, when an asset reaches a significant milestone (such as its end of life), it is almost impossible to find the asset and record that change. It is also more difficult to reconcile the assets against their budgets.
Get a Big-PictureView of Planning, Budgeting, and Tracking
An IT business management solution can help address the challenges discussed here by connecting the systems that store detailed information about assets with the corporate accounting system and describing them in a way that IT can understand. When IT administrators can get an accounting perspective on their IT assets in terms they can understand, it is far easier to identify and correct budget variances, plan future purchases, and save money in ways that will not have a negative effect on critical business processes. For example, rather than manually poring through hundreds ofthousands of general ledger entries, seeking to reconcile expenditures with records of IT hardware, the accounting staff or cost center owner can receive reports listing only the variances they need to investigate. When the CIO has a more granular, context-specific view of the specific IT financials, he or she can more accurately predict related costs, such as maintenance, licensing, and network expenses.
Read more about this subject in this new thought leadership paper titled: Reach Beyond ERP Systems for Managing IT ServiceCosts, Financial Planning, and Budgeting
By: ITSM Guy