Apply TBM & Apptio to Accelerate Data-Driven Decision Making

How long does it take to make a data-driven decision in your organization?

How much time does your organization spend on improving the speed and accuracy of the decisions you make?

It’s likely that your organization spends more time getting the data required to support the decision than it spends on improving the process. It’s also likely that your organization struggles to track the improvement of speed and accuracy of your decision-making process, which is essential as trajectory-altering decisions are made in a climate with this much uncertainty.

There are few processes and tools that, when employed, will lead to accelerated decision making, and even fewer that can demonstrate hard ROI. However, our customers contend that the combination of Technology Business Management (TBM) practices and Apptio solutions can speed data-driven decision making and track the impact – thus quantifying improvement.  Execution requires investments, and investments require analysis. Organizations that can make high-quality decisions fast – and execute on those decisions faster – realize a higher growth, or return, on their decisions than their peers.

Let’s explore this idea a little deeper.

Define the cost of ineffective decision making

According to a recent McKinsey survey, organizations spend up to 37% of their time making decisions, and more than half of that time is spent ineffectively. For managers at an average Fortune 500 company, this inefficiency could translate into more than 530,000 days of lost productivity and roughly $250 million wasted labor costs per year.

Making good decisions requires elements such as information to discredit the initial hypothesis and designated leaders to play devil’s advocate. The bigger the decision, the wider the scope.

Every day, the pace at which IT leaders are required to make material decisions about technology investments increases. And still, access to quality data to inform those decisions is the most significant barrier to effectiveness. Decisions on technology investments require a combination of granular cost and consumption data from financial and operation management systems that has been translated into insights stakeholders across the business can understand. The speed of data transformation needs to be accelerated because time-consuming, error-prone methods that aren’t repeatable will fail to help your organization scale. Furthermore, as organizations look to scale cloud for elasticity, scale, and agility, the quantity and complexity of this data increases, making it harder to get the right data to the right people at the right time.

TBM + Apptio = Better, faster data-driven decisions

TBM provides technology leaders with standards and validated best practices to communicate the cost, quality, and value of investments to their business partners to accelerate effective data-driven decision making. It provides recommendations on which data sets support your business objective to ensure you only spend time bringing the most critical data into your decision-making processes. It then shows you how to continuously improve your data quality over time. TBM provides a standard taxonomy to describe cost sources, technologies, resources, applications and services, to provide categorization of your data, providing you with an industry-standard classification of costs.

Apptio provides the platform to drive TBM at scale. Apptio ingests data from hundreds of source systems (including finance, labor, infrastructure and operations) and uses machine-learning to automatically map your data into a standard IT cost model in minutes providing an unparalleled engine to manage allocations. The TBM taxonomy is built into all Apptio products. To further this, Apptio offers a pre-built library of Insights gathered from over 1,000 customer deployments, which represent the most common areas where organizations identify discretionary spend, optimize costs, and reduce risk. Once those actions are performed, organizations can track and monitor progress against that action.

Over the last decade, Apptio has been deployed in some of the world’s largest, most complex IT environments. What we consistently see before TBM methodology and Apptio automation are systemic challenges with effective decision making across their technology, finance, and lines of business organizations. Armed with Apptio, those organizations shift from spending 90% of the time it previously took to gather, model, and share granular cost and consumption data, to time spent on the activities that support an effective data-driven decision-making process.

By trimming the fat from their process, they build muscle to collaborate, look at information from different perspectives, and develop alternative scenarios. Apptio customers openly cite their abilities to answer ad hoc questions about costs and consumption 95% faster, enabling them to make decisions at the right levels of the business, align those decisions to corporate objectives, allocate resources to those decisions, commit to those decisions, and track the value and impact of those decisions. Collectively, this arms them to make higher quality decisions faster than their competitors.

Watch this quick two-minute video for a better view into how TBM and Apptio work together to help drive data-driven decision making.