Apptio Service Quality and Utilization

Apptio's Service Quality & Utilization module enables IT organizations to effortlessly measure and track key metrics on the quality and utilization of their IT services. Automatically calculating and reporting on service levels helps IT communicate to the business units the overall quality of services delivered. Operational metrics regarding the usage and utilization of IT services provide IT with deep insight into capacity needs, helping to identify underutilized services that are appropriate targets for consolidation, and deliver the actual usage data needed for true consumption-based showback or chargeback.

"A service is a means of delivering value to a customer by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks." ITIL V3 Service Strategy

Managing the business of technology requires that you manage more than cost. Well run IT organizations spend as much time driving up the return on assets as they spend managing the total costs. Since IT has a high proportion of fixed costs, you must maximize the utilization of fixed assets and drive down unit costs. In addition, partnering with the business means you must measure and communicate the quality of IT services you are delivering to your business partners. In both cases, marrying cost, quality of service and utilization data takes IT to the next level of management maturity.

Quality of Service

Service quality is typically tracked by an IT organization in the form of service performance metrics measured against service level objectives (SLO). Apptio can collect uptime metrics, support response time, user performance characteristics and compare those to SLO’s for a true picture of service performance. Common SLO’s include uptime, average speed to answer support calls, first call resolution percentage and number of maintenance windows.

The impact of outages or impairments can also be quantified in financial terms to drive investment decisions such as adding new servers or re-architecting an application to improve uptime.

Driving Up Return on Assets and Capital with Utilization Data

IT tends to have a significant fixed cost structure. Measuring KPI’s with regard to asset utilization helps to drive up the return on fixed capital and delay or avert future capital expenditure. Common IT performance metrics that facilitate this are facility utilization, asset utilization, virtual server compression ratios, the percentage of unused storage, and FTE to device ratios as a measure of employee productivity.

Analyzing Quality and Utilization with IT Service Costing

Server quality and utilization data can be combined with cost data to improve decision making and drive more accurate allocation of service costs to business unit customers.  For example, this enables the identification of application or infrastructure that can be virtualized and the creation of a full business case including the ROI of moving to virtualized infrastructure. Marrying cost and utilization data can help IT organizations assess storage efficiency and measure the financial benefits of changing archival policy or leveraging AWS.

Integrated with the Bill of IT

Apptio IT Service Performance can be seamlessly integrated into a Bill of IT to help business units understand the Quality of Service they are receiving from IT. This approach also forms the basis for the joint negotiation of more realistic and cost-effective service level objectives between IT and business units.