Every organization needs to be exceptional at managing the budget of their IT department. With IT spending worldwide expected to reach well over 4.0 trillion US dollars before 2022, organizations everywhere will be spending more money and resources on tech than ever before.
The truth is that managing your IT budget involves more than just keeping your spending within certain parameters and cutting costs. It also means seeking continuous improvement in the price performance of your IT department and driving complete value from your investments. Effectively accomplishing change and ensuring all of this gets done can be a daunting task—one that can quickly grow more complex and pricey by the day.
Your IT department needs to run like its own business, and that includes the financial side of things. That way, you can empower your entire organization to rely on IT’s support as though it was another business partner, enabling your team to run as efficiently as possible. Luckily, you don’t have to do it all alone. ServiceNow offers essential capabilities that will help you streamline the management of your IT budget and make sure everything runs smoothly. Let’s dive into exactly how you can use ServiceNow to manage IT financials, including everything from investment planning and forecasting to spend optimization, chargebacks, and switchbacks.
Start with Investment Planning, IT Budgeting, and Forecasting
Before you can optimize and capitalize on your newly improved IT department’s processes and finances, it’s essential to start planning and forecasting your investments, goals, and needs. The ServiceNow platform enables you to easily connect your goals and strategy to your investments by ensuring that your actions are aligned, allowing you to guarantee that every investment you make achieves what you need to accomplish. Plus, with the capability to make real-time updates to budgets, the ServiceNow platform helps you adapt should your organization’s needs change—always providing you with the tools to realign as necessary.
Additionally, ServiceNow provides a centralized space for you to cooperate easily across disparate departments, as well as integrate all information under a single system. This will help your team track all important information, work together to make essential changes, and continuously check in and review progress. With everything under one umbrella, following up on progress and next steps doesn’t need to be time-consuming or challenging. It can be more intuitive and productive and even help you save hundreds of thousands of dollars.
ServiceNow also makes it easier to prove the value of your IT department to the C-suite and other change leaders. Through the single system of digital workflows provided by ServiceNow, your organization can continuously connect to plans and projects, making it easier to not only defend but also increase IT budgets. Similarly, it can help you identify errors such as duplicate spending, budget surprises, or missed approvals. By filtering out extra noise from IT budgeting and providing one comprehensive space, ServiceNow provides an excellent solution for organizations searching for IT budgeting tools that will offer ease of use and visibility across departments.
Invest in IT Spend Optimization
IT Spend Optimization is one of the most powerful projects you can complete with ServiceNow to enhance and manage your IT financials. ServiceNow provides you with reports featuring insights into your overall spend and budget, trends and forecasts on spending, breakdowns of who is spending the most and on what, and more. Overall, these tools ultimately help you understand where and how you currently spend on resources. Not only does this encourage users to formally request standard items—driving costs down—but it also eliminates any wasted effort for requests that are unfunded and prevents your team from spending unnecessary money.
On top of this, ServiceNow IT Spend Optimization also offers analytic capabilities, which predict order quantities based on seasonality and other influencing factors. This will help guide purchases and simplify the staged inventory process, empowering you to spend your budget on technologies your team genuinely needs.
Along these lines, the software also flags maintenance costs for assets that you no longer need or that aren’t in service. Rather than spending money on outdated technologies unnecessarily, your team can use ServiceNow to eliminate the money pit and spend your budget elsewhere.
Best of all, ServiceNow’s IT Spend Optimization provides complete visibility into all aspects of your spending, including a full account of software licenses—even those that have been deleted or stolen. It also provides a three-way match to make sure that your team doesn’t pay for items that weren’t received or ordered, ties contracts and purchase orders to the IT budget, and overall prevents overspending. To top it all off, the UI is designed to make the process easier and more seamless by responding to repetitive questions so Procurement doesn’t have to.
Setup Showbacks, Changebacks, and Billing of IT
When it comes to sticking to a budget, holding your team accountable for their resource usage is essential. That’s where chargebacks and showbacks can help. An IT chargeback policy involves billing each department for the number of resources they use within a specific period of time. Showbacks, on the other hand, offer visibility into resource usage without charging the IT department for their usage. Whether you want to implement chargebacks or showbacks as a step in your process to implement change and monitor your budget, they are vital to tracking spending, and ServiceNow makes using them easy.
ServiceNow inherently contains essential assignment classifications, making the platform more defensible than one-off solutions. Vital capabilities—such as drill-downs to activity-based costs and ties to investments and planning—are innate to the platform. This means that all team members can access comprehensive visibility into application optimization, allowing them to generate a defensible bill of IT in minutes. Because these capabilities mitigate the pressure to do more with less in order to spend less, IT will easily be able to prove their worth and focus on what will provide the most success—not what will save them money.
In terms of ongoing success, showback and chargeback projects in ServiceNow provide predictive forecasts into future spending through visibility into IT budget overages and future budgeting estimates. This offers invaluable insight into how showbacks may be lagging behind and where solutions can be provided to solve these indicators. Most importantly, these features enable the C-suite to have objective discussions around the IT budget, helping IT get the funding they need to be that essential business partner that the rest of the organization needs.
At the end of the day, being able to understand, manage, and plan for an IT budget is essential to any organization’s success. With the right financial tools and excellent support, you can ensure that you aren’t spending significant amounts of money on technology that is outdated, unnecessary, or simply not serving your needs. With ServiceNow, all of this and more is available to your organization, allowing you to empower your IT department and turn them into your very own business partner.
Creating an IT Management Process with ServiceNow
It's easier than ever to create sustainable processes with ServiceNow. To learn more about how Crossfuze can provide your organization with the support it needs to use ServiceNow as the full financial powerhouse it can be, reach out to us at LetsTalk@crossfuze.com.
