IT Cost Transparency and Show-back
The Requirement:
A large public sector organisation was under pressure to clearly show how its IT spend was supporting specific public services. Our client needed to move towards a “show-back” reporting of IT costs as part of delivering a greater insight of technology spend to senior stakeholders.
Our Approach:
In the early phases of the engagement we worked with our client to identify and map key fields within their general ledger to our own chart of accounts (COA). Once complete, we then mapped the client’s assets and service elements to the same COA.
After mapping was completed and validated, a specific business area was chosen as a pilot. Using our detailed methodology and playbook we worked with the client to identify each IT element used by the pilot business function and then used that information to further enhance the data previously mapped. We also created an initial design of the Dashboards at this point.
We then processed the data through our IT Transparency toolset and produced a set of dashboards, reports and tables that were loaded into a cloud platform for the client to review and test.
After the pilot was approved, we were able to rapidly expand the service to the remaining business areas. Finally, peer data was inserted for comparison purposes and regular monthly feeds were setup.
The Outcome:
The client now has an interactive service delivered by ImprovIT that provides them with the ability to drill-down and interrogate their own IT costs as required.
The service is updated monthly to provide an always current view of IT spend from a “consumer” viewpoint, and they also receive a regular data feed of IT spend market data allowing them to clearly understand how their spending compares to other similar organisations. This new ability to clearly show where the IT budget is being spent has moved the conversation from “we think IT costs too much” to one of “what level of investment in IT is appropriate for the services we need?”
