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“Apptio’s trusted and proven framework, cost allocation capabilities, and integration with SAP and ServiceNow made it the right fit for CSOB’s evolving needs.”
CSOB IT needed greater financial transparency to align IT spending with business priorities. Faced with inefficient processes, inconsistent cost reporting, and limited visibility, the bank turned to IBM Apptio to automate its IT financial management operations and elevate its strategic planning capabilities.
Since implementing Apptio, CSOB has transformed its IT financial management. Hundreds of monthly data loads are completed within two days. Service catalog creation has been reduced from weeks to a single day. Errors from manual spreadsheets have been eliminated, and IT leaders now have a single source of truth for application and infrastructure costs. Most importantly, Apptio has enabled more informed decision-making across the organization, empowering IT and business leaders to speak the same language when it comes to cost, value, and investment optimization.
Československá obchodní banka (CSOB) is a major banking and insurance provider in the Czech Republic, and part of the Central European financial powerhouse KBC Group. Founded in 1964, CSOB is headquartered in Prague and has over 8,000 employees. With a vast portfolio of consumer and business banking services, including smart mobile banking, mortgages, insurance, and investment services, CSOB is one of the largest banks in central Europe and a cornerstone of the region’s financial infrastructure.
CSOB started its journey with IBM Apptio over a decade ago. Back then, the company managed IT financial data using a mix of SAP extracts and manually updated Excel spreadsheets. This fragmented system had several drawbacks:
As a result, the system had to be heavily customized for it to work. In addition, CSOB lacked visibility into the full cost of services. Cost models were outsourced to KBC Group, with little transparency or flexibility to run what-if scenarios or make real-time adjustments.
When a new head of IT was appointed, there was a renewed focus on financial discipline. Having moved into the role from a financial department, this person had a strong financial background. He wanted to understand IT costs at a granular level and make IT budgets as transparent as possible, in order to know what services were running, how much they cost, and why, so he could justify them to business leaders.
CSOB implemented IBM Apptio in 2014 after a proof of value (POV) project demonstrated its ability to deliver transparency, automation, and structure. This decision was ultimately driven by the need for transparency and insight that would help company leaders optimize IT costs.
CSOB’s Apptio journey began with standard financial reporting (e.g., P&L, cash flow) focused on IT budgets. Over time, the company expanded into project portfolio reporting, cost center reporting for IT managers, IT service unit pricing and service catalog modeling, and application-level costing by integrating financial and configuration data.
Apptio let CSOB build the business logic themselves and understand what was really behind the numbers with a high benefit of flexibility and transparency. Apptio’s trusted and proven framework, cost allocation capabilities, and integration with SAP and ServiceNow made it the right fit for CSOB’s evolving needs.
Adopting IBM Apptio for IT Financial Management (ITFM) has produced significant outcomes at CSOB:
Prior to the adoption of IBM Apptio, ITFM at CSOB was predominately a manual heterogenous process, extracting data from core systems into Excel so it could be updated, corrected (if necessary), and then reported out to different cost center owners. This was a time-consuming process that provided no real transparency and very little insight.
IBM Apptio has streamlined and enhanced ITFM. Data extractions are now automated from multiple source systems (SAP, HR, and ServiceNow) using Datalink, eliminating manual work and saving time. Hundreds of monthly data loads are now completed within two days including pre-load and post-load verification process.
Automated data extracts combined with other Apptio capabilities also enabled CSOB to create its own service catalog, gain more control over cost modeling and service pricing, and save time in the process.
By adopting IBM Apptio, CSOB also achieved significant time savings in processing IT Service catalogue and respective unit prices. Using Apptio standards and proximity/availability, CSOB IT was able to speed up iteration turnover from a week to a single day.
By replacing its former spreadsheet-based process for ITFM with Apptio, there is no longer a need for manually preparing data extracts or editing shared Excel files, and CSOB has virtually eliminated manual errors. This has improved data accuracy, giving business and IT leaders more confidence in the cost reporting.
Apptio has also helped surface missing or misaligned data. For example, when CSOB’s TBM team combine financial data with configuration items (CIs) from ServiceNow, if data is missing, it is very easy to identify a root cause. This enables CSOB to inform configuration owners so they can make corrections, helping improve the overall quality of the data and reporting.
Using just Excel to combine financial and configuration data without relevant platform was an impossible mission due to a huge number of specific data sources and complicated relationships of configuration items in the Configuration database in ServiceNow. IBM Apptio provides a standardized and stable platform to execute this task in a simple, repeatable and high-quality manner.
One of the biggest drawbacks to CSOB’s previous spreadsheet-based process is that business and IT leaders did not have a common language when it came to discussing costs. This often created confusion and made it difficult to discuss cost reduction or optimization.
IBM Apptio provides an industry-leading platform for IT costs in a language everyone understands. Costs are broken down into key categories (labor, infrastructure, licenses, third-party contracts) and business and IT leaders can now have more productive optimization conversations based on facts, not assumptions. This provides key insight to help leaders make data-driven decisions, such as identifying duplicate licenses or which applications are prime candidates for consolidation or retirement.
CSOB IT, by using IBM Apptio as a communication platform, speed-up consolidation of the terminology across departments using the references to Configuration database and visualization of associated costs to respective configuration items and IT services.
CSOB has significantly improved ITFM using IBM Apptio. But future plans are even more exciting. CSOB is currently exploring using Apptio Benchmarking to provide data for industry comparisons. Moreover, CSOB’s implementation team is working on linking project costs to applications to calculate complete Application TCO for all applications in use during their service life.
CSOB would also like to reinforce a concept of single point of truth and information access related to IT costs by extending the current solution to business drivers (e.g. number of transactions, number of users, etc.) and its evolution in time to provide deeper insight to further enable efficient decision making and optimization.
