ITFMA 2012 Conference Attendees Agree: It’s Time to Put Discipline around IT Finance

In the heart of San Francisco, more than 225 IT finance professionals from private-sector companies and government agencies gathered together last week at the ITFMA’s Financial World of Information Technology Conferences. This marks the organization’s 25^th year and the event honored industry leaders who have helped advance the field and financial discipline around the delivery of technology.

If you attended the show, you know the event was abuzz with the latest innovations around automation of manual IT finance processes and taking a best-practices approach to IT finance and business management. If you couldn’t attend, we’re excited to share highlights from the five-day event:

Increased  Market Awareness – Overall, the sentiment is that there needs to be greater focus on IT financial transparency– and that new focused technology can bring greater control and visibility to IT finance and business management. Attendees were able to view a live demo of the ComSci solution and learn how it automates the terabytes and petabytes of data that have to be processed for true transactional data layer and for the data repository to be defined.

IT Leaders Want Ability to Control Multiple Budgets – Attendees revealed the challenges with working with budgets in silos across IT and using manual processes to aggregate IT’s financial and performance information together. In addition to discussing the shortcomings with Excel-based processes that are prone to error and static information, attendees learned how today’s automated ITFBM solutions can dramatically improve budgeting, planning and forecasting processes, as well as cost modeling and showback/chargeback processes.

It Takes a Village – Beyond lectures, workshops and practitioner presentations, IT finance professionals were able to network, share ideas and engage in peer-to-peer discussions to learn how IT industry leaders are increasing discipline around IT finance and business management. Community-building was strong at the show, where attendees could network with peers and their families could enjoy San Francisco’s spectacular amenities and extracurricular activities.

The Great Debate was ….Great – One of the most popular and well-attended sessions was a presidential-style debate where IT financial management thought leaders went head-to-head and discussed topics such as build versus buy, chargeback versus showback versus allocation, and tools versus processes. With time limits on responses and active audience participation, this “must attend” session had fever-pitch excitement and addressed a wide range of today’s IT financial and business management issues.

In addition to regular conference sessions, IT finance professionals wanting more depth were able to attend a number of three-hour pre-conference workshops on topics such as Calculating the True Cost of IT Services. Attendees gained practical hands-on information such as best-practices for cost modeling and why it is better to be approximately right rather than precisely wrong. The workshops also gave participants additional opportunity to network with other senior level IT finance peers and participate in collective sharing of knowledge for ITFM best-practices.

As the next several years will bring great change to IT organizations with wider adoption of cloud services, IT teams will need to be prepared to broker IT services internally versus externally and use newly focused technology applications and tools to make more informed decisions and gain insight into total cost of ownership. The conference proved valuable in preparing IT finance leaders to think differently about IT finance and business management and advance their own organization’s discipline around the delivery of technology.

ComSci will be participating in the ITFMA’s 2012 summer conference to be held in August. If you’re looking to advance the practice of IT financial management at your organization and learn more about ComSci’s award-winning Software-as-a-Service and Business Process-as-a-Service IT finance and business management solutions, consider joining your colleagues and ComSci at the next ITFMA event!