While I was at our Raleigh Executive Briefing Center (EBC) this week, I saw my first glimpse into a recent acquisition of the company CIMS Lab. The technology is now rolled into a product called ITUAM and aims at really enabling the concept of charge backs to come to life. Here is the IBM page for ITUAM.
I think this picture sums the concept up quite nicely.
In my last job, management spent countless hours trying to manually do this. We built a time tracking tool (that just made everyone happy) to try and account for time spent doing various tasks, projects, maintenance, etc. which was then correlated with asset information from the IT perspective (in another home grown tool), which was correlated with Finance asset information from Great Plains, which was all mashed togther with their secret sauce in some BASS (big a#$ spreadsheet).
If this ITUAM product really simplifies an organizations goal to understand costs associated with a business process, activity, service, application, datacenter, type of hardware, software, network, people, etc. or move towards a charge back environment then it’s sure to be another winning product in the Tivoli portfolio. From what I saw from our dynamic speaker (“Mr. Serverguy”), the approach and technology makes sense to me assuming you can get access to all of the datasources you’d need to round out the costing model you choose to implement.
One key point that stuck with me from my various ITSM/ITIL training was that even if you aren’t moving real money there is real power in a zero dollar invoice delivered to your internal customer, line of business, etc. This can start to have a real mental impact on how they view the IT services they’re provided and help them associate a dollar value to what they may be taking for granted.
Understanding the costs to deliver a service, process, function can become an important metric in many other ITSM areas. I see this technology underpinning many other areas we talk about and providing a powerful tool during budget planning and contract renegotiation time with vendors, suppliers, etc.
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