Thavron SolutionsHere are the slides from my Thursday Afternoon talk on the Implications the budgeting proccess has on Service Cost Models. This was presented at ITFMA in July of 2013.
http://www.slideshare.net/Thavron/cost-model-implications-of-the-budgeting-process-24546516
Just as the commoditization of IT hardware and software has been a market shifting force for the attitude toward Corporate IT and the role of the CIO; the growth of the Share Economy is a driving force for the future of Business Services.
As Corporate Executives get used to hopping into a ZipCar and vacationing in someone else’s house via AirBnB,keeping an entire HR department in house or having their company own an R&D department rather than using an outsourced Engineering as a Service company seems incongruent. As they become more comfortable usingTaskRabbit to get things done, or leveraging tool sharing services for rarely used power tools around the house, Job Shop manufacturing as a service or HPC/Complex Data Analytics services seem like a natural choice for infrastructure heavy but intermittent service needs. And when it comes time for internal re-orgs? The efficiency and flexibility of having internal service providers becomes an easy transition.
However, just as Trust is the currency of the Share Economy at home, it will continue to grow in importance in the realm of Corporate Services as well. If you are a service provider, whether internal or external, you will need to have well defined, well managed services that are easily measured and analyzed. Service consumers will continue to demand transparency, communication and clearly visible metrics to understand the status of the services they pay for.
To be competitive in the Share/Service/Trust economy, you will need to be mature in the Service Lifecycle with tools that are easy to access from anywhere in the web, on any platform. How do your Services and Tools enable you in this journey?
No Service?
I talk to some folks who insist that they “have not moved to a Services model yet”. What this really means is that the Services they provide are uncontrolled.
A Service is defined as :
serv·ice
1 [sur-vis] Show IPA noun, adjective, verb,serv·iced, serv·ic·ing.
noun
1. an act of helpful activity; help; aid: to do someone a service.
2.the supplying or supplier of utilities or commodities, as water,electricity, or gas, required or demanded by the public.
3.the providing or a provider of accommodation and activities required by the public, as maintenance, repair, etc.: The manufacturer guarantees service and parts.
4.the organized system of apparatus, appliances, employees, etc.,for supplying some accommodation required by the public: a television repair service.
If, in the course of your business you provide something to someone else- a report, a data set, interviewing new hires, monthly financial analysis, a prototype part or internet access- you provide a service.
Defining, understanding and managing the services you provide allows you to make data driven decisions, rather than being randomly pulled by your customers. If your business does not plan and operate via defined services, now is the time to shift from tactical customer reactions to Managed Business Services.
”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.
If you are interested in IT Financial Management, please note:
Dear ITFMA Colleague:
Just a reminder that this Friday is the final deadline to save $500 off your registration fee plus a 10-20% discount for groups of 2 or more to attend next month?s ITFMA World of IT Financial Management Conferences at the Marriott Riverfront Hotel in Historic Savannah, GA. Your registration fee gives you access to all twelve of the optional workshops on July 8-9 and all four of these conferences on July 10-12:
– IT Financial Planning, Budgeting and Reporting Conference
– IT Financial Management for Controllers and CFOs Conference
– IT Asset and Expense Management Conference
– Government IT Financial Management Conference
Go to www.itfma.com/wfm for conference details and registration (click on “Register”) or call me at(805) 687-7390 to register.
We will be there to run a workshop on Metrics and Transparency, as well as giving a talk on Modeling the Relationship between Service Costs, Budgets and Forecasts later in the week.
Let us know if you will be there