Anyone out there push TBM data to a data warehouse once a month?  If yes, what type of data do you send - application costs, business unit costs?  Thank you!!

Jenny,  our group exports a host of data to a DW every month to assist in building a complex analysis dashboard (we call it a 10-blade swiss army knife -- most folks use the summary blade, but occasionally folks need to use one of the can-opener implements on another blade to get more information on what's going on).  To do all that fancy stuff, our DW hosts and transforms detailed drill-to reports into something that can be consumed by an external visualization product (Tableau).  We will drill from Tech Services to various sub components all the way to ITRT and from ITRT to Cost Source to show data as low down as the cost pools...  I hope this helps.

Hi Erik

Would be interested if there is a reason why you do not do some of this reporting in Apptio itself? I believe that a tool such as Tableau has a more professional look and feel to it but also maybe there are some performance, functionality  or end user considerations to?

Great question.  In the last 12 months, we have undertaken a series of studies and experiments to see if we could reel back from our export-happy approach to provide customer reports.  There is no real panacea here -- we have a legacy model construction that has been adapted (with expert help from the Apptio teams) for R12, where our original, implementation (project) team made decisions based on the tools that were available at the time (and wouldn't necessarily align neatly to eventual iterations of the ATUM model), which stymies the use of Master Data sets in some cases... and where Apptio struggles with providing intuitive avenues of "all in one view" data and graphs (which initiated the first forays into DW-based reporting), the exported/DW method means that change management efforts are multiplied by 2 or 3x (change tabular report, change export/import, change view elements in DW, update Tableau).

We constantly debate internally on where the dividing line ought to be between depth and breadth, as any healthy, growing team does.

Our long-term goal is to provide basic reporting capabilities that highlight actionable and objective intelligence on our IT Spend to the broader organization and use Tableau for supporting deeper, curated research that we intend to inspire the whole "Run IT like a Business" mindset.  The Apptio "Out of the Box" solutions, which tie to ATUM constructs and should meet expectations for 80% of the TBM user base, are very close to being broadly deployed (nearest target is Aug 2019) to coincide with a significant modification to our cost model which aims to move us from nearly pure 'cost transparency' only to 'showback and cost transparency' views.

I hope this helps.  I'm a pragmatist in the end -- whatever it takes to create the opportunity for victory in the space we can influence … but I also don't want to kill our flexibility in the long term, so we continue the good debate and search for a virtuous cycle with all our toolsets...

Hey @Erik Brown- it does, thank you!  Remembering now that y'all don't have a prod instance (back when you were R11) and don't use the OOTB reports.  Did you create tables on the Apptio side in dev to show the results, and then export that over to the DW?  Guessing you would have something like that bc you'd want the allocations/calcs to run to produce the results, then push it over.  I may be completely wrong, tho.. 

We had a prod instance in R11, but then we didn't create one initially with R12... back in the good ole days... or bad ole days?  Either way, we actually have a prod instance now in R12 for Cloud stuff, and it's queued up to show our new Out of the Box reporting as it is 'in progress' and getting close to delivery there.

But, yes, we have developed tabular reports that are in DEV and calculated up to STAGE … we pull our values for the DW exclusively from a calculated STAGE (but we could pull from PROD, depending on circumstances).  The model is what we use to differentiate our financial analysis from the traditional financial analysis, and we use whatever tools available to then visualize that...

And to be complete, our goals also include providing that backing data to our visualizations as a data source for non-TBM'ers to use it for their reporting purposes long-term.  We've been reticent to acquiesce to non-TBM'ers to leverage our background data because giving broad access to the raw data could lead to bad conclusions... but we have recently decided that if that's what it takes to get people to play in our sandbox (and stop throwing so much sand from the sidelines), it's worth the possible pain we risk in making it broadly available.

Erik