Apply TBM & Apptio to Accelerate Data-Driven Decision Making

Organizations that can make high-quality decisions fast realize a higher growth, or return, on their decisions than their peers

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 your decisions?

Your organization likely 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 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

McKinsey research shows organizations spending 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 in 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 must 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 is a discipline that improves business outcomes by giving organizations a consistent way to translate technology investments to business value. Adopted by leading enterprises worldwide, TBM is backed by a standardized taxonomy for mapping technology assets and resources to business outcomes. TBM offices in an organization bring IT, finance, and business leaders together to get an accurate view of their technology footprint. TBM delivers a single source of truth that all teams can understand — leading to better collaboration, increased trust, and defensible decisions. ​Organizations that adopt TBM can make decisions faster, react quickly to changing market dynamics and optimally leverage cloud and Agile practices to deliver on business objectives.

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.

Registration for TBM Conference (TBMC) 22 is live! We’re back in person to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the TBM Conference. This year, we’re in Austin, TX, from the 7-10th November. TBM Conference (TBMC) 22 will show you how technology leaders evaluate their investments and portfolio to reallocate resources and defund underperforming digital initiatives to win the digital race. ​

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