Technology Business Management (TBM) and SAP

IT executives are seeking ways to drive greater transparency and insight into their IT resources and services while managing IT with commercial acumen. Many of their business peers rely on SAP® technology to manage corporate functions. However, unlike finance or procurement, the SAP suite has not been optimized for managing the cost, consumption, and value of the technologies and services that IT departments deliver. In order to compensate this gap, many organization introduced comprehensive, manually updated spreadsheets with limited flexibility and granularity.

By introducing Technology Business Management, companies can now automatically integrate operational and financial data sources (e.g. SAP) from using a standardized TBM taxonomy and then apply intelligent cost modelling to create a comprehensive view of IT costs. For consistency and acceptance, it is important that the cost figures  are reconciled between both systems. Apptio's TBM solution makes this easier by integrating data directly from SAP, with no external data transformations needed.

While SAP is the strategic solution for managing core processes built on corporate master data like cost centers and accounts it does not manage the transparency of IT, TBM acts as a Sub-Ledger and becomes the system-of-record for IT cost and value while providing new capabilities to the corporate, such as:

• Pre-built data model for IT cost analytics (Structure and guidance to integrate IT finance and operational data)
• Pre-built cost model aligned to IT benchmark data (Easy comparison of monthly costs to benchmarks)
• Taxonomy of IT functions endorsed by IT peer organization (Standardized terminology for organizing IT costs)
• IT Budgeting, forecasting, and variance tracking (Automation and centralization of IT planning processes)

Conclusion
As an enterprise running on SAP, your business already has a solid foundation for using TBM and Apptio to manage the cost, consumption, and value of your IT portfolio. Furthermore, you understand the value of using best-in-class software for running the most important parts of your business being in a advanced position to immediately gain competitive cost advantage by introducing TBM.

Technology Business Management is a data-driven approach for measuring, managing, communicating the cost and value of IT and built up on standards and best practices from the TBM Council, a non-profit organization with already more than 2300 members. Learn more about TBM at the next European Summit in London, June 8th