Data Aligns Your Technology Investments to Business Strategy

Most organizations will admit they’re unsure if IT spend consistently aligns with strategy. Cluttered portfolios can hide duplicate capabilities and obscure the value of each application, product and service — blurring the value of your investments.

Technology and business executives must understand the financial implications of one-off actions (e.g., canceling a project, not renewing a vendor contract) and strategic shifts (e.g., cloud-first or product-led innovation) on their IT portfolios. A complete understanding of the financial implications of decisions ensures investments connect to strategy. These are the decisions that matter. Get them right with good and timely data and automation you can count on.

We are excited to share the latest innovations to the Apptio portfolio, enabling organizations to better connect their technology investments to business value better. Organizations can now gain deeper insights across their entire technology footprint — no matter where they operate their business or how they do the work.

Apptio’s new innovations will accelerate and improve your data-driven decision-making and ensure each investment aligns with your strategy.

Integrated Investment Planning (IIP): Better business outcomes

Changes in your investment strategy that alter operational and support costs can deliver budget surprises and tie up resources longer than planned. Traditional accounting tools don’t address the specifics of IT finance, making it difficult to map general ledger-driven accounting to IT services, let alone the higher layers of the TBM taxonomy. Organizations must manage their resources to stay on budget and focus spend on the most impactful areas.

As we move to an increasingly agile world where decisions need to be made quickly and often, you must be fully aware of the financial implications of shifting resources allocated to various investments. Technology leaders need one investment view – designed for IT – right next to the broader technology operating costs for the business. Additionally, you need to understand these investments over multiple years to parse the “build” costs from the “run” costs over time — regardless of where you are in your transition from waterfall to agile.

As a new feature of ApptioOne, IIP helps you understand multi-year financial plans for your technology investments and leverages run and grow insights that drive better business outcomes. These investment-related expenses are now natively integrated into the broader financial planning capabilities in ApptioOne, and line items are tagged as being associated with specific investments. The new capabilities also include a dedicated Labor Resource Planning functionality to track and allocate all internal or external labor associated with investments and even manage the cross-charges for internal labor to avoid double-counting. IIP also enables multi-year planning for investments, which means you can understand the cost of building it today and the operational implications for the future.

Cloudability TotalCost: Capture and allocate total cloud program spend

Traditional IaaS, aka your public cloud bill, only represents a portion of your true cost of cloud. When aligning cloud investments to strategy, cloud leaders need the ability to see, measure, and share cloud costs across a diversified portfolio. Alignment helps the business understand when rising cloud costs correlate to accelerating innovation and profitability — or inefficiencies that need to be addressed.

Cloudability TotalCost is the only cloud financial management solution in the market that factors all the direct and indirect charges to calculate the total cost of running your cloud-based solutions.

Cloudability TotalCost enables users to connect public cloud costs from the major cloud service providers (CSPs) to costs outside of their cloud bills such as labor, support, additional cloud costs like interconnection or content delivery network (CDN) costs, and cloud applications like security or database services – all together, into one lens via Apptio BI.

Our customers can aggregate and allocate cloud costs beyond the three major cloud providers. When combined with the power of Apptio’s leading FinOps tool, Cloudability, we help organizations capture and bring financial accountability to the total cost of running the cloud.

Targetprocess Enhanced Team-Level Integration: Clear visibility across teams

Many development teams inside an organization already have a team-level tool for their Agile development. However, different departments or business units sometimes have their own team-level tools or multiple instances of the same tool. The challenge for enterprises is ensuring clear visibility across all teams and understanding how their work relates to overall company objectives. That requires viewing, managing, and prioritizing work across teams.

To solve this, Apptio is strengthening the integration of Targetprocess to popular team-level Agile management tools like Jira, including the ability to support multiple Jira instances and validate bi-directional synchronization.

Targetprocess’s enhanced team-level integrations bring portfolio management and strategic alignment capabilities to organizations already leveraging tools like Jira for team-level Agile management. The enhancements enable complex organizations to get the value of Targetprocess without changing how teams operate, feeding team-level information from different tools into a single portfolio-level view.

Targetprocess Validation Rules: Improve operations and data integrity

You need automation to operate in an agile manner. However, there are points in time where you need to verify information. For example, to validate items before advancing a project, ensure a submission has all necessary information, or prevent changes to items at a certain stage.

Apptio Targetprocess now improves operations and data integrity by enforcing validation rules on agile workflows. These rules ensure that organizations adhere to company processes and data requirements while promoting automation and speed.

These rules can verify required information, permit changes to particular objects, or only prevent change states without specific requirements. These rules will help organizations improve data integrity and align with company-specific needs.

Apptio Targetprocess customers can learn more about enhanced team-level integration and validation rules here.

Technology investments that align with corporate strategy show front offices and corporate boards that technology decisions are business decisions. With these new capabilities, Apptio is accelerating, and improving, your data-driven decision-making and ensuring your investments align with your strategy.