Top 5 Financial Management Predictions for 2010
CIO.com's Brian Carlson sits down with Sunny Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Apptio, a provider of on-demand IT financial management SaaS (software-as-a-service) products. Gupta discusses five key trends for financial management in 2010.
CIO —
Recently I was able to sit down for a discussion with Sunny Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Apptio, a provider of on-demand IT financial management SaaS (software-as-a-service) products.
Apptio's IT financial- management package is intended to provide greater visibility into the TCO (true cost of ownership) of IT products and services. The desired result is so that businesses can identify ways to reduce IT costs and Apptio contends, making better decisions and providing the business with a more accurate reflection of true IT cost.
With this level of increased visibility into the IT cost structure, it is inevitable that there may be some resistance from senior IT leaders to this degree of scrutiny into their operations by the business. Gupta reflects on what this means to IT leaders and what he believes will be five key trends for financial management in 2010.
1. CIOs Will Adopt Greater Financial Management Discipline.
Gupta believes that enterprises will no longer be able to manage IT without automated financial- management systems in place. He argues that drastic cost cutting has made CIOs realize that they cannot run IT without proper financial management discipline. General purpose spreadsheets or corporate planning systems may no longer be sufficient to manage the myriad of computing models and dynamic nature of todays IT infrastructure.
2. CEOs Will Require IT to Demonstrate Value of Services.
IT organizations that cannot explain the total cost of an IT service to business leaders may begin losing credibility. Like any service provider, IT must track the cost of delivering goods and services, and have systems in place to analyze, allocate and reduce costs, while also communicating to the CEO and other business leaders the value IT provides.
3. Role of the CIO Will Shift to a Service Provider.
Up until this decade, the role of the CIO has traditionally focused on technology. In the past if the business users wanted to implement a new application or technology, their only real choice was to obtain support from internal IT. During the last few years, however, several forces have gained critical mass to drive change to that model.
Internal IT is now one of many options, and today's CIO should act as a central "service provider," pooling IT resources for efficiency and delivering services to many different buyers within the organization. As a service provider, CIOs should develop better processes for managing the supply and demand of IT services, whether sourced internally or externally, and the cost and quality of those delivered from his organization.
