#1

Business Management
for Technology Services

     

Description
of our service

Leading technology functions aim to under-stand and manage how IT provides the right service at reasonable cost with maximum value to their business customers.
 
We help our clients to introduce and harvest the benefits from an innovative, widely accepted industry standard for running IT as a business: “Technology Business Management” as defined by the highly recognized TBM Council.
 
Ellix consultants have been the very first to successfully introduce TBM in Europe. Equipped with hands-on TBM experience since 2009, we empower technology leaders of mostly large-scale, international enterprises to understand and optimize the cost and performance of IT across the full corporate value chain. They are enabled to communicate and adjust the cost, quality, and value of IT services to their business partners’ needs. With that, IT is shaping and contributing to the strategic business agenda by driving growth, innovation, and agility of an enterprise. We achieve high acceptance and longevity of TBM by acknowledging, that TBM needs to reflect the very specific characteristics and objectives of our clients. We tailor TBM best-practices and embed them in daily decision making, management routines and core financial processes, such as budgeting and charging.
 
While having strong knowledge of market leading software providers, e.g. Apptio, ServiceNow, Magic Orange, SAP and others, we always remain 100% IT tooling vendor independent. This guarantees, that our advice is free of 3rd party interests and we are only committed to our client’s success.

Case study

Global
Manufacturing
Company

100k

Employees

120

Countries

1bn $

Total Admin Expenses

Sponsors —
CIO, CFO

Drivers for change — Our client’s senior management perceived IT’s contribution to business priorities and financial performance below expectations. IT customers lacked understanding of their consumption of IT services and were not able to influence IT charges. In contrast IT service producing units lacked understanding of service production cost and therefore did not assume financial accountability, just for IT operations. A misalignment between decision makers on IS cost and actual payers did not set the right incentives for balancing value for money. This lead to a multi-year track record of material, non predicted overspending of IT budgets, hardly any funding for innovation and low flexibility to adjust to new market realities.
 
Project objectives — Enable IT to be best aligned to business priorities and provide value for money in a reliable way.
Increase flexibility and agility to adapt to new market realities.
 
Project approach — A fast assessment of the current setup against TBM best-practices revealed five capabilities that need to be enhanced or newly introduced:

    1. A consumer-oriented, end-2-end IT service catalog that facilitates dialogue between IT and its customers.
    2. Capability to continuously calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO) of IT services (incl. cost drivers and utilization of resources), and their consumption.
    3. A service-based budgeting and review capability that is tailored to strategic decision making.
    4. A service based charging model, which set the right incentives and rewards cost efficient buying behavior.
    5. A “service governance” which describes the rules, bodies, roles, processes and tools for the new TBM discipline.

    Achievements — TBM and its transparency is now continuously applied in the daily IT management and embedded in core financial processes in an efficient and automated way. Charging is based on true consumption and financial budgets are set based on business demand. Service owners are empowered and enabled to assume commercial and operation accountability for their area. Service cost, consumption, performance, improvements and long term roadmaps are discussed in joint service review meetings with senior management and the business. A solid, reliable understanding of IT’s resources, services, cost and consumption allows for a fast adjustment to new business demand and changed market conditions. A parallel hunting for cost savings not only provided for a funding of the TBM transformation but also lead to an IT spend below budget. Perceived value for money from IT is now high and the CIO is an appreciated partner at the company’s senior management table.