Thought Leadership & Tools
Expert Opinion – Why BI Fails
It is a fact that most businesses have a minimal idea of what their IT budget is actually being spent on. This is where Cost Transparency comes into the picture: it offers organisations the ability to create visibility and an understanding of the costs and volumes of their entire IT product and service portfolio so that the business can make informed and fact-based strategic and tactical decisions around its IT investments. Cost Transparency effectively takes the total cost of IT – including your infrastructure, people and time allocations, data consumption, licensing and other, similar costs – and encapsulates this in an IT catalog, which delivers an itemized list of IT products and services, including price and volume information with bench-marking against prior periods, budgets and industry standards.
These costs can be assigned to specific business units, enabling each unit to drill down to the exact source that a specific cost is attributed to. This provides them with the platform from which to make the right decisions around their IT investments.
This may sound a lot like Business Intelligence (BI) but is, in fact, vastly different. BI tools extract data from many systems and then deliver this information to the user. While Cost Transparency is similar in some respects, it offers a far deeper understanding of the information than is possible through using BI alone.
Cost Transparency enables a much more granular view of the information than BI, as it focuses on understanding the relationship between different activities and entities within the business, as well as all the costs and drivers associated with these. It takes into account not just the direct relationships, but even the more oblique connections so that the true cost and value of every aspect of IT can be thoroughly understood.
In effect, where BI offers you the ability to extract and display information, Cost Transparency extracts, configures, processes, and then displays. And it is in the configuring and processing stages where the lines are drawn between the various relationships that enable such a granular understanding of IT, and those relationship value chains differentiate the Cost Transparency tool from a typical BI tool.
Ultimately, the Cost Transparency tool is designed to help businesses to reduce, consolidate and standardise expenditure. After all, if you are able to effectively unpack the cost of IT, you can use this knowledge to drive improved savings. Cost Transparency is designed to give business access to the levers it needs to make truly informed IT decisions, unlocking greater value from existing IT investments and delivering increased savings with regard to future investments.