Closing the Loop From Business Strategy to Technical Execution
As the leader in Technology Business Management (TBM) for nearly 15 years, Apptio has built a reputation for enabling IT leaders to make smarter decisions faster. Today we are excited to announce that we are now also helping to execute those decisions more quickly and efficiently with the acquisition of Targetprocess and the introduction of […]
7 Pitfalls of IT Budgeting and Forecasting
Planning is painful for all lines of business—but IT Finance has it tougher than most. Pick your (IT planning) poison. Go with a set of home-grown spreadsheets and drown in “email governance.” Or try to retrofit your IT-specific budget details into your company’s corporate planning system. Neither satisfies the specific needs of IT budgeting and […]
Apptio Launches Agile Investment Management
Accurately plan your entire portfolio of investments, including all relevant resource costs, in alignment with both Agile and Waterfall delivery processes. Apptio’s new offering/service, Agile Investment Management, enables business, finance, and Agile development teams (portfolio and product owners) to collaboratively analyze, prioritize, and plan product/project investments while ensuring that associated labor resources and costs are […]
Apptio Empowering State Farm’s Digital Transformation
A thorough understanding of IT cost structure is saving State Farm millions while breaking down age-old communication barriers between IT, finance and the business. Rethinking digital With the rise of mobile devices, apps, and high-speed networks, the days of branch-office visits and store-to-store comparison shopping are waning. In this environment, staying competitive means continually […]
Christopher Pola on Agile Financial Planning Adoption
Christopher Pola, Executive Advisor Rally Software helps organizations adapt enterprise-wide processes, like finance and HR, to agile ways of working. Let’s talk about agile financial planning. How do you do agile financial planning in the first place? What are some of the challenges of trying to run agile with the old-world waterfall concurrently? To kick […]
The Case for Agile Financial Planning
Agile-driven products aim to deliver quick time-to-value, but the annual IT budget process wasn’t designed to serve the needs of Agile. A 12-month view of spend commitments doesn’t jibe with the need to measure and tweak the on-going delivery of business value from Agile workstreams. Organizations apply Agile adaptive planning practices to overcome these limitations—and […]
Financial Planning for Agile Environments
Agile teams need to quantify delivered value and understand team efficiency. Agile finance practices support these required capabilities. Agile development has become the norm for most development shops. It delivers quick pivots based on end-user feedback and allows more flexible dev resourcing. This flexibility causes issues for finance professionals accustomed to fixed budgets for fixed […]
Measuring Agile Productivity with Agile Metrics
Agile development helps organizations move faster (while retaining quality), make smaller bets on new capability, and more closely align delivery to customer needs. IT leaders must validate the impact of Agile development with metrics that measure Agile productivity. Agile metrics also track how cloud solutions deliver on their promise of low initial investment to enable experimentation, […]
AI ROI Can Be Calculated in Tangible and Intangible Returns
“In the new world, it’s not the big fish that eats the small fish, it’s the fast fish that eats the slow fish,” warns Klaus Schwab, founder, and executive chairman, World Economic Forum. That’s a great visualization to motivate enterprise leaders to get serious about implementing AI technologies, and understanding AI ROI, so their company […]
Agile and TBM: Transforming the Business of IT for the Better
Dean Leffingwell is the creator of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®), and co-founder of Scaled Agile, Inc. He works with companies scaling Agile from a few teams to tens—and even hundreds—of teams building large-scale systems and software solutions. Here he talks ROI, business engagement, and the opportunity to apply TBM to initiate, fund, and measure […]
VIDEO: How Allstate’s IT Finance Team Turned Business Partners Into Champions
Digital transformation at Allstate has given agents, adjusters, and other stakeholders more efficient ways to serve ~16 million households. It’s also been the catalyst for rethinking the traditional role of IT finance. Watch the video to hear how Allstate’s IT Finance team became a stronger business partner to drive real accountability and change. Read the […]
Here’s What Gartner’s 2018 IT Spending Prediction Is Missing
Gartner recently released their latest prediction for global IT spend in 2018, projecting a 4.5% increase from 2017 to a total $3.7 trillion. Worldwide IT Spending Forecast (Billions of U.S. Dollars): » Source: Gartner (January 2018) This estimate is comprised of the total cost of all IT purchases projected for 2018, which is great news for growing IT organizations […]
5 Ways for Finance Teams to Become More Agile
Companies can sometimes make the budgeting and forecasting process more difficult than it already is by accepting their laborious, tedious and often frustrating manual processes as status quo. But the secret to a simplified, more harmonious planning future may be right under your nose, in your IT department. IT teams have spent decades evolving the […]
Infographic Reveals Obstacles to Delivering IT Business Value
The term “black swan” is a popular metaphor used to describe an unpredictable or unforeseen event that results in extreme consequences. Black swan events are typically rare, but for IT services and projects they have become too frequent for comfort. Research from McKinsey reported a staggering 17% of IT projects go so bad that they threaten the […]
To Increase Agility, Foster Business & IT Harmony in 3 Areas
The modern enterprise is defined more by IT than by any other factor. IT suffuses the organization, powering productivity, enabling new product development and innovation, and enhancing collaboration, customer-connection, and employee engagement. Put simply, IT is now synonymous with business. Though this has become a truism, organizations still suffer from the business-IT schism. Often, business […]
