Purpose: Below is a case study demonstrating how Apptio Cost Transparency is utilized to solve a business problem
Business Problem: Limited visibility of "Billed Cost" (from multiple vendors) towards company applications.
Objective: To enhance the Apptio Application TCO model and associated report to meet a specific business need
Technique: Enhanced existing customized out of the box Application Billing Model to expand the inclusion of bills from multiple vendors and allocate the total billed amounts towards applications
Scenario: We already have an Application Billing Model built into Apptio Cost Transparency. It is designed to allocate billed costs to an application from a vendor's bill. This custom model leverages the concept of TCO and allocates billed costs such as Fixed Support, Compute (Server, Storage, & Data Center), and Tickets. The problem was that it was geared and designed to allocate costs from a single vendor. There was a need to incorporate bills from other vendors into the model and the associated report.
Process Steps:
I followed the following high-level steps to achieve the desired outcome.
- Investigated the business aspect of the problem
- Worked with the stakeholder, obtained business requirements, determined technical requirements
- Analyzed existing solution in Apptio TBM Studio, created a branch, checked out the Application Model
- Analyzed the new data coming from the additional vendors; worked with stakeholder to get clean data
- Created new tables for the new data, appended into the master data, and routed into the model
- Added necessary formulae, lookups, and mapping into the master table
- Added application retirement data, added lookups into the master table to pull in the retirement dates
- Updated the model steps where needed and validated the data using model tables
- Checked out the Application Billing Report and updated to add filters and column pickers
- Enhanced and fine turned the report graphics
- Checked in the report, model, and tables. Validated the model and report.
- Conducted testing and validation with the stakeholders
- Merged the branch with the trunk and promoted to stage and production.
- Announced the release of the solution to the stakeholders with live demo
Outcome:
- Users can view and rationalize the billed cost for an application
- Report helps users understand the composition of cost in terms of sub-towers and vendor
- Report helps users identify applications with costs incurred after application retirement; which can lead to IT cost savings.
- Report provides visibility to duplicate costs and highlights application served by multiple vendors; which have potential cost saving opportunities
- Application retirement data helps planning teams rationalize application disposition – both near term and for long term
- Additional fixed support contracts data helps Vendor Management better understand the applications listed under specific contracts and the respective cost allocation between applications
- Supports application level analysis and support and compute tier based impacts
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