As college students, one of the first things we learned was how to manage our personal finances. Success was having enough money at week’s end for a night out with friends (or doing your laundry). If you’re planning the 2020 IT budget there’s much more on the line.

IT leaders are in the hot seat to drive innovation and business growth, but many struggle with IT initiatives that are stalled or never get off the ground. Forty-four percent of those surveyed point to insufficient funds as the primary cause of such failures. Meanwhile, business partners with the power to approve or deny IT expenditures keep as much as 15 percent of their budget locked up in contingency funds.

One of the reasons for this tug-of-war is the widespread use of spreadsheets. Amid continued growth and diversification, most IT organizations (70 percent) still use manual processes to track and record IT spend, making it increasingly difficult to forecast the cost and value of apps and services and set aside funds for new investments.

“We could see the slow Circle of Death with spreadsheets as we loaded more and more data into it and see it really struggle to handle it.”

- Jeremy King, VP of Technology Business Management, Globe Life

Practically speaking, many of your responsibilities are about running the business, but it’s become more important than ever that IT help drive decisions about a company’s strategic growth. So as you begin 2020 IT planning, now is the time to replace spreadsheets and homegrown solutions with a purpose-built solution designed to help get your IT financials sorted and find opportunities for savings and investment.

“It’s difficult to be business-aligned if you’re not able to show how IT spend and IT costs are aligning with business priorities. For us, it’s about running IT like a business and shifting IT to be very business-aligned. My team and I wouldn’t have been able to do that without the transparency that Apptio provides.”

- Eileen Baines, CIO, CoBank

Apptio’s Financial Management solution uses IT-specific insights and analytics to uncover areas where you can optimize your IT spend, free up contingency funds and establish ongoing discipline. With the right solution in place, you can accelerate budget and forecasting by as much as 80 percent. And this means you have more time to analyze your IT spend and free up funds to reinvest in strategic business initiatives.

Watch a personalized demo of how Apptio can help you plan more efficiently in FY 2020.