As IT continues to morph into business technology, it increasingly gets the same treatment and is subject to the same expectations as any other business operation. But many IT operations and development groups lack the business maturity to effectively demonstrate the business value of IT investments and operations.

Business users are demanding greater IT cost transparency and financial analysis in order to understand the true cost of IT. They believe the transparency and analysis are critical in enabling them to intelligently manage demand for IT services and participate in cost management decisions.

Some of the most pressing needs in this respect are clearly measured, continuous process improvements as well as better documentation and analytics about all resources used to manage those processes.

IT financial management will be the new mantra where standard business practices like budgeting and activity-based costing (ABC) will become the norm for IT organizations.

• Achieve financial visibility across IT spend
• Reach beyond the corporate general ledger to gain the missing IT and business context of IT costs.

• Automates and centralizes IT budgeting and planning
• Leverages IT cost information from other BMC solutions
• Pulls federated cost information from HR, ERP, and other financial systems of record
• Breaks down IT service costs by hardware, software, staff, contractor, maintenance, and vendor-provided services
• Supports hierarchical department-level planning and access controls
• Eliminate budgeting spreadsheets, minimize manual roll-ups, and reduce risk exposure
• Easily identify key cost drivers
• Perform “what-if” budgeting analysis to quickly evaluate the impact of different projects and sustained-spending scenarios
• Plan capital expenditures and project depreciation impact
• Calculate total cost of ownership for IT services, applications, projects, and business processes to connect costs to business value drivers
• Enable managers to create, update, and monitor actual costs