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Events Presentation Services TBM

When your world changes , how do you cope?

In Business, everything changes eventually.
If you have modeled your Service costs, there are lots of changes that require an update or change to the model.

    Things in your company/service can change:

  1. Has your company undergone a re-org?
  2. Are you using a new technology to deliver the service?
  3. Did you outsource all or part of the service?
  4. Did you change vendors? Are you changing the billing model for your customers?

    Your general philosophy toward service costing may have changed– perhaps you are maturing from a flat allocation to the business to a service consumption model.

    You may be changing tools that you use to model the Service costs. – is it time to put an automated model in place?

    Whatever the change, there is a likely impact to the actual cost of service and you will need to be able to explain why and how the service costing will change so that the business can be prepared. There is nothing worse that getting a bill and seeing a rate change in the bill for the first time.

    Recently at the ITFMA conference in Atlanta, we presented and had great discussion with the group on things to consider to rationalize and socialize a service costing change. It includes things to avoid (all of which are mistakes we have seen real customers make before we start with them) as well as things to be certain to include in your planning.

    Enjoy!

    If you are getting ready to embark on a project that impacts your services costs, please reach out to us for some deeper advice and engagement:



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Data Events Presentation

Data Readiness Assessment- ITFMA Workshop Slides

While we never recommend an engagement that is supposed to “get your data ready” for a Service Costing or TCO activity, we strongly believe that a company should understand their data before they start engaging vendors and creating model designs.
Here are the workshop guide slides from our Workshop on this topic at the ITFMA conference in Atlanta this week. The Workshop had lots of great discussion and sharing among the particpants- thank you all. The second part of the workshop was outside of powerpoint, so is not included here.
If you want more information about our data assessment templates or how you can conduct these activities, please contact us.

Service Costing/TCO Data Assessment from Thavron Solutions LLC
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Events

A new partnership for new service insights

As we begin to built on the new ServiceNow ITFM module, we are excited to announce a new partnership with Explore Analytics that will allow us to bring exciting new Dashboards to our customers. Below is the official press release:

Kokomo, IN, April 21, 2015– Thavron Solutions, LLC is excited to announce a partnership with Explore Analytics to provide advanced graphic dashboards and KPIs for IT Financial Management and Business Service analytics for their customers on the ServiceNow platform.
“Explore Analytics allows us to easily integrate both ServiceNow and other data sources and embed those elements in specialized dashboards within ServiceNow for our ITFM and Business Service Customers. The advanced graphical components native to Explore Analytics with drill down capability allow us to provide the dashboards and reporting our customers demand”, said Nan Braun, CEO of Thavron Solutions.
“This is an exciting opportunity to translate the power of Explore Analytics to meet the specific needs of our customers. Thavron brings an incredible wealth of knowledge of business service management and financial management, which they bring to our customers with pre-defined best practice dashboards and metrics,” said Gadi Yedwab, CEO and founder of Explore Analytics.
Companies wanting a demonstration of the portfolio dashboards should email info@thavronsolutions.com or contact them at https://thavron.com.
Thavron Solutions is a Business Service consulting and technology solutions company that assists Fortune 500/Global 2000 companies in defining, modeling, costing and managing their services to improve bottom line performance. Their customers include companies in TV and Entertainment, Public Utilities, Financial Services, and Pharmaceuticals. Thavron has particular expert knowledge leading customers in their management of IT, Manufacturing, Engineering and HR services.
Explore Analytics is a cloud-based Business Intelligence platform. Unleashing data across multiple data sources, the Explore Analytics application empower users to define their own real-time reports and publish rich, interactive views for web, mobile, and tablet. Get out of the data warehouse and connect to your information within minutes

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Events Metrics Presentation Services

The IT Service Portfolio

We were happy to lead a lively workshop full of discussion on the IT Service portfolio at the ITFMA conference in Norfolk.
The workshop covered the IT Service Portfolio definition, metrics and getting to real business value measurements. The Guide slides from that workshop are embedded here, or are available on SlideShare.
Be sure to contact us if we can answer any questions or assist you on your journey.

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Events Opinion

Taking time to smell the roses….

​”a rose by any other name…”

Shakespeare worked hard to convince us that no matter the name, a rose always smells sweet. The problem is that you have  to get close to the flower to tell that it has a sweet smell. If you walked past a red flower and someone told you to “look at that aphid feast”, you are less likely to walk over, stick your nose deep in and sniff to discover the sweet smell.

Getting someone to pause and take time to understand what your software does is a common roadblock for new software.   You may be a rose, but you need them to stop long enough to sniff. After spending some time at HP Discover this week, it became apparent that they have an unrecognized rose.

Around 2 years ago, HP released their new Executive Scorecard software. There was a big sales promotion, lots of customers bought it, but only a fraction have implemented it fully- mostly because apparently no one was certain what the value add was.  Some of the folks I talked to called it “HP’s best kept Software Secret”, others told me it was Shelfware, but seemed eager to learn how to leverage it.

Considering only the name, you may think to yourself  “scorecard=high level metric dashboard”. While there is a reporting level with hundreds of built in KPIs, when I paused and took a closer look it was apparent that HP has a gem of a tool buried under mis-naming and marketing pains.

Executive scorecard is more of analytics/modeling platform than a scorecard. While it does have a nice reporting surface with infrastructure easily wired to tie objectives to KPIs, underneath it is a data consolidation/ modeling platform with a capability to build and test scenarios.  It comes with Cloud Analytics and ITFM (IT Financial Management) modules out of the box (although they can be customized to fit your particular processes/infrastructure), but you could model and report on almost any scenario that your business needs to solve.

If you are in the market for Cloud Analytics or a Corporate ITFM solution, you should add it to the list of applications you evaluate. Thavron is also planning on adding it into our toolset of solutions for many of the Service Lifecycle projects we tackle, giving our customers the power to model alternate solutions and adding to their power to make Data Driven Decisions.