ComSci's Whitepapers

Best Practices for Benchmarking IT Budget Ratios

Looking to learn more about Benchmarking for IT?

CIOs, executives and IT professionals who wish to learn how they can attain better results from benchmarking their IT spending and staffing ratios are encouraged to read this informative whitepaper.

Benchmarking is a popular way for IT organizations to justify their IT budgets and better focus their efforts to achieve a state of continuous improvement. But without following certain principles, business leaders will likely question the validity of the outcome.

For more information, please download this white paper in PDF.

Creating Technology Financial Accountability

IT financial transparency delivers three strategic sets of insight that drive reduced spending:

• IT financial transparency helps business users understand the cost of IT products and services and enables strategic spending decisions.
• CFOs gain greater transparency and detailed insight into IT costs, revealing the true cost of spend at the business unit, department and even individual level.
• CIOs need insight into unit costs to better define and understand IT service delivery and its costs.

Without a line of sight into each corporate entity's own consumption and the true cost of IT products and services provided to them, the IT team and business management cannot make informed technology decisions or effectively change consumption behavior.

For more information, please download this white paper in PDF.

False Transparency Leads to Flawed Decisions: IT Financial Management Transparency

By establishing true insight into the costs and consumption of the resources under their responsibility, technology managers can establish credibility and assume a stronger role in strategically managing technology resources. The complimentary white paper highlights how complete technology transparency should be addressed at four basic levels:

• Consumption Transparency - IT can help businesses make better decisions about its use of technology by providing comprehensive insight into the actual technology volumes consumed by each part of the business and the associated costs and resources.
• Total Technology Transparency - While technology costs can be embedded in lines of business or business functions, total technology captures all technology assets and costs, regardless of budgeting practices and ownership.
• Technology Performance Transparency - Recognizing that technology and business audiences require different measures to manage their respective activities, technology performance management addresses domain specific measures that technology organizations use to optimize technology assets.
• Business Oriented Technology Performance Transparency - Technology organizations continue to struggle to communicate the value of technology in clear business terms. Business oriented technology performance transparency communicates the role that technology has on creating value, optimizing costs and responding to changing market conditions.

For more information, please download this white paper in PDF.

Managing the Cloud: An Even Greater Need for IT Cost Transparency

The Four Critical Requirements
The white paper highlights how IT Cost Transparency and TFM can address four critical requirements for the effective use of cloud computing:

• Financial Transparency - Issues such as accuracy in billing, reconciling costs across multiple providers,
  allocating costs back to business users, and understanding the total cost of ownership for both internal and external IT
  resources are essential
• Compliance - The virtual nature of cloud resources can put companies out of compliance with laws that require tight controls on the movement of data across international borders
• Demand Management - Cloud computing costs are demand-based, so companies must manage demand to manage their costs
• Governance Policy - Cloud resources are virtually unlimited, so to control costs companies should set limits on what can be done and then enforce those limitations

For more information, please download this white paper in PDF.

The Strategic and Operational Advantages of IT Cost Transparency

Today, every organization faces the same key questions:

1. How can our organization lower its IT costs?
2. How can we ensure the best value for our IT expenditures?
3. How can our organization make better decisions about how to use technology?
4. How can we react more quickly and effectively to opportunities in the market?

This white paper outlines the strategic and operational advantages of IT cost transparency, a "game-changing" approach that is enabling companies like 1-800-FLOWERS.COM to reduce costs and become more effective in their decision making.

For more information, please download this white paper in PDF.