ITBM or information technology business management is all about aligning work activity with business goals. Platforms such as ServiceNow offer a way to deliver products and services that correlate strongly with strategic priorities. Kim Vu, Business Analysis and Engagement Manager at AC3, explains the range of applications it can cover, which include application portfolio management, financial management, ideation and demand management, resource management, agile development and test management.
Demand management is one of the key elements because businesses comprise a pipeline of work – there’s an initiative or project that the business is looking to carry out, whether that be generating a product, a service or some other sort of business value. A demand management application provides the capability to objectively measure and evaluate this. Is that initiative or project worthwhile? And how does it align with the overall strategic direction of the business? Do the costs and resources required to complete that task make it a reasonable activity?
When something is objectively evaluated it can be allocated to a quadrant – high cost, low return, for example. Clearly, the preference for most businesses would be low cost, low effort and high return, so being able to consult a mechanism to provide that matrix would be an advantage.
Should the result recommend going forward, other applications in the ITBM product suite would be able to help the business execute, control and manage that work. Instead of a business spending all of its time merely ‘being busy’ it can become focused on being ‘busy achieving its goals’. And this is where the system enables speedier change in organisations. By providing those organisations with a hyper-focus on investing in solely the right kinds of operations, projects and internal initiatives, those organisations can deliver on their business goals a whole lot faster and more effectively.
The second advantage of ITBM is all about transparency, in that it delivers greater business control through the visibility of work execution. As Vu explains, businesses not only get end-to-end alignment of their work with their strategic goals, but they also get visibility of all the related data. There are myriad benefits of this – such as the ability to obtain clear summaries of all required sourcing in cost plans (CapEx and OpEx) and quantifiable gains in benefit plans, while project team members also execute and track their work time in the system, resulting in accurate actual costs.
The overall advantage is simple to quantify – time to value. Organisations can make difficult and complex work appear easy and the full value of their products and services can be realised.
Faster change is just the beginning
Speeding up progress is a huge benefit of ITBM for businesses, but it’s not the only one. Capability aligned to agile or scrum development methodologies can ensure rapid release and faster provision of value, while the ever-pressing challenge of resource management is addressed – meaning that the right resources are being used on the right work, and balancing resourcing demands against current availability and capacity will help with scheduling. Avoiding unnecessary delays has a positive impact on the bottom line.
Added to this, there is a plethora of data that is collected when a business genuinely embraces all the integrated capabilities of the applications in an ITBM product suite. All the financial metrics and data relating to what it costs to run the business, the costs of break fixes and projects are collated, providing the organisation with real business intelligence it can use to understand exactly how it is operating and, importantly, how it can improve its operations in the future.