So, coming from the consultant angle of Apptio and TBM, I can't help thinking, why doesn't Finance use Apptio?  Obviously there are some things Finance would need in addition to what exists already for the IT organization.  It seems like a natural progression to me for Apptio...then the teams are in the same tool budgeting, forecasting and reporting.  What are some thoughts on that?

In our organization, we have a fiscal team in IT business office.  The goal is for the team to leverage the data in Apptio for forecast and the annual budgeting process.  However it seems the fiscal team is not very confident with the data quality in Apptio, they rather download the data from SAP directly into excel and manipulate data there.  We just have a new manager joining the fiscal team, she thinks that the Apptio team and Fiscal team needs to work closer together and the fiscal team needs to communicate and map out the existing process so that Apptio team can figure out how to customize reports to replace the excel being used by fiscal team.  We are hoping to start mapping the process next month. 

Coming from the Finance system side to Apptio from what I've seen it will be viewed as an add on system rather than a true Finance system unless it has Accounts Payable/Receivable, Trial Balances and Payment capabilities hidden somewhere.

That doesn't lessen the impact but when you invest in a Finance system you'd hope to have this functionality to an extent.

Some may still prefer viewing/working w/the actual expense detail vs the fully-burdened variety, too.  You need both, though.  Great to see the individual expense detail, but also great to see how it all paints a picture of the enterprise as a whole once all the pieces are knit together.

This is a topic quite close to my heart. We are using Apptio for both Finance (traditional Cost Accounting views) as well as Service / Product financials (Service Accounting). On the core Finance side we use ITP for monthy forecasting and annual planning, CT for the finance management reporting on the actuals vs forecast vs budget and and Vendor Insights for AP/Payment reporting. The TBM office sits in an IT Finance team which maybe helps to explain the approach. I do not think you can ever get Finance or Accountants completely away from excel and the source GL but given that we have a detailed GL table loaded into Apptio we have built a number of summary management reports and more transactional Finance reports to replace legacy Finance reporting. However, this does require customized reporting as I do not think the Out of the Box reports fulfill the requirements for core Finance users.

While the overall approach has many advantages there are some considerations:

- Performance: it requires a detailed GL table to be loaded into Apptio to meet the detailed reporting and analysis requirements from Finance. Such a detailed table can have performance implications and requires alot of reconfiguration to have off model tables for detailed Finance reporting and summarised GL tables flowing up through the model. It is far from an Out of the Box implementation

- Architecture: the monthly finance cycle requires transfer of data between ITP and CT a number of times over a 2 week window early in the month. This can require data to be pushed to production and a full model calculation (even though you are only reporting on the very bottom of the model rather than Towers or Services) which if you have a big and complex model with a long calculation time can be operationally challenging (particularly given tight Finance timelines). This has improved slightly with recent updates to ITP which makes the transfer of data into CT much easier but the issues still remains to some extent. 

- Reporting and Maintenance: as mentioned the Out of the Box reports do not really meet the needs of core Finance users and customized reporting is required. Deciding to run core Finance processes on the system adds to the overall workload and maintenance efforts

Its an interesting question and I think that ultimtely the issues mentioned above steer core Finance folk away from using the tool. However, with some configuration updates, customization and alot of hard work I think it is achievable but we are early in our implementation and would not yet like to cliam success. 

To be honest, I cannot quite put my finger on this phenomenon even after this many years immersed in Apptio/TBM. In my limited knowledge, I would attribute this to a perception issue. I completely agree with the comments above and what Chris said specifically --"I do not think you can ever get Finance or Accountants completely away from excel."

I experienced first hand when my previous employer shifted the Apptio/TBM office into Finance's operational function to produce the monthly Bill of IT. My manager and the rest of the group have always 'perceived' Apptio/TBM as an IT only tool. Somehow they still do everything in Excel first before they even try going into Apptio to get the same results. There is always a hesitation to trust the numbers produced by Apptio and most cycles are spent on comparing the same results generated by the excel spreadsheets gathered form the SAP/ERP systems.