Unbidden by anyone but my own curiosity, I am interested in hearing from Apptians and Apptio customers about the standard ATUM Tower and Sub-Tower categories.

Specifically - which categories cause the most confusion?  Which categories do you miss?  Why?

Keep in mind that governance of these categories is in the hands of the TBM council, and a lot of thought went into the creation of these categories.  They weren't created arbitrarily and without careful care and consideration.  Maybe this discussion can help us to discuss and agree on how to use these categories where ambiguity arises.

I'll share my observations to get things rolling.

I sometimes find the sub-categories under Security confusing.  Lets say I have a client who provides some sort of biometric authentication for a particular group of employees.  Does that fit into the "Security Policy" sub-tower or the "Compliance" sub-tower?  I suppose if the motivation of using the biometrics is to comply with a regulation, then one would use "Compliance."  So otherwise we would use "Security Policy."  Perhaps the reasoning being that you either put authentication technologies in place to comply with an external regulation, or to comply with an internally developed policy.  This kind of makes sense.  If you don't have an internal or external policy telling you to implement a security tool or protocol, why would you do it?  Maybe, for a smaller company, for example, you don't have a written policy, but the authentication tool is put in place to respond to an unwritten policy of minimizing risk.

Another topic that came up is what to do with an internal BI dev team.  Should report and dashboard development using standard tools like SSRS, Hyperion, Tableau, or Clickview be considered "App Dev", "App Support", or something completely different?

Let me know your thoughts and lets get a healthy discussion going about the Towers and Sub-Towers.  How should these be used to support meaningful reporting and benchmarking?

Hi Daniel,

Nice question! I am also interested in finding out how to assign the left over assets that are owned by IT department but do not match any appropriate towers. I have seen assets like vehicles, camera, office machinery for higher education clients.

Dashboards and reports could be considered App Dev and reflect the App TCO for Tableau or Business Objects. But I am not sure how the Data Warehousing costs should be allocated as the same DW could be supporting Tableau/Business Objects/Qlikview.

Daniel / Shobha,

Great questions... Let me try to provide you my perspective on the specific areas you have in question.

Daniel -- You mention the tower of Security.  Lets use the definition from the placemat to start for Security and it's Sub-Towers:

Security:  IT Security resources setting policy, establishing process & means, measuring compliance and responding to security breaches

Compliance IT Compliance resources setting policy, establishing controls and measuring compliance to relevant legal and compliance requirements

Disaster Recovery IT Disaster Recovery resources setting DR policy, establishing process & means, dedicated failover facilities, performing DR testing. NOTE: DR designated equipment is included directly in its own sub-tower (e.g. extra servers for DR are included in Compute tower, etc.)

Cloud Disaster Recovery Public cloud Infrastructure-asa-Service (IaaS) on-demand disaster recovery services

Ok... So nothing in the above definition helps you.. I get it.  However, let me try to provide you with some guidance.  As you think about Biometrics, it is a "security" feature... but it isn't necessarily a Security tower cost that I would push into Security... why?  Think about the Consumer.  Who is getting the benefit.  This service is for the End User... .It's an End User compute service so the company can be more secure... but it's the internal employee who will consume the service because it's a security requirement.  It's better to load this cost to EUC because it's more relevant than loading costs into Security and allocating that by an overhead allocation.... So, I would re-direct Biometrics to End User / Workspace and/or End User Mobile Devices.... If this is biometrics for things such as getting access into facilities, then I'd allocate those costs to Facilities.  But it doesn't (in my mind) fit into "Security).  Think about who is having to use the technology first before you categorize costs into towers.  So ... my .02 on that front.

App Dev vs. App Support

Lets look at the definitions in ATUM again:

Application Development

Resources involved with the analysis, design, development, code, test and release packaging services associated with application development projects

Application Support & Operations The operations, support, fix and minor enhancements associated with existing applications

From the definition, I would absolutely draw a hard line where App Dev is 100% in hours custom code apps.  Any type of Customer Off The Shelf (COTS) application software such as (Apptio, Tableau, Qlikview, Clarity) is concerned where it's ONLY configuration (in my mind... configuration is any application where you are not coding in a structured language like C++, .Net, etc).

Shobha -- For Your examples --

1. Vehicles -- Interesting how Vehicles are in a IT budget... but I would imagine this needs to be expensed to the Cost Center that gets mapped to the person who owns the vehicle.  So if the person driving the car is a Server Tower manager or exec, the vehicle gets allocated to that tower.

2. Camera - Same as Vehicles.

3. Office Machinery - Same as Vehicles.

Hope this helps!

Thanks Kevin. Your insights are very helpful.