Updated the Apptio model and/or allocations to meet a specific business need

I started working on this project in June 2022. Our TBMO team has been doing deep dives into our largest Services over the last year. During my review of our Computers Service I noticed that we weren't representing our Network cost in a defensible way. Our model didn't have a network inventory and was modeling the network cost in a 50/50 split between end user devices and data centers.

We met with several groups throughout the organization (Network, People, and Location Management). There were 3 key findings from these conversations:

• We will not have access to a network inventory anytime soon
• We can receive more robust people data that will let us determined Business Unit percentage by location
• We can receive additional metadata for each of our locations (capacity, floor count, flex workers, etc.)

Even though we didn't have Network inventory we decided that we could make use of our other key data points. First is that we know what costs are related to the Network Tower. Second is that we know what locations those costs are tied to.

A new object was created that is backed by our master location data. That location data is then supplemented by our newly acquired location metadata. We are able to send Network costs from Towers to our new object based on location match. Any Network costs that don't have a location (or matching location) are weighted based on the capacity of the location. From there costs are sent to the Data Center if there is a location match. Otherwise they are sent to the Internet Connectivity Service. The Internet Connectivity Service is consumed by the Business Units based on our newly acquired robust people data. There is a lot more detail about how the math of all of this works in the case study. Feel free to reach out to me if you are working on something similar and could use some help.

One of the tenets of TBM is to not wait for "perfect" data. We all know this and apply it to our daily work with TBM. My biggest lesson learned from this project is that sometimes you can make major improvements even when you don't have any of the standard data.

Thanks to @Debbie Hagen for reviewing!

Thanks for reading,

Andrew Schneider

TBMA

Red Hat

#ACE

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Andrew Schneider
Red Hat, Inc. (Red Hat-IT)
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#ApptioforAll

Way to go, @Andrew Schneider!! 🤩🥳🙌​

Excellent, @Andrew Schneider! Network costs are notoriously difficult to handle properly. Great!​

Really great stuff here around the network space. I did a very large cost cutting project at a major us bank a few years ago and we made a killing off of auditing the lines in and were able to eliminate hundreds of outdated connections and configurations that were being paid for no reason other than they were never shut off. And yes - availability of data is a huge issue in this space and is never in the CMDB or other ITAM systems - great job of managing that. As your CSA I'd really like to see this succeed - let's talk.