Repeat after me: IT is not just a cost center.
Sure, that’s easy to say—but are you having trouble finding a way to prove it among the “money people” and, well, everyone else in your organization?
That’s why ServiceNow developed a suite of financial management tools specifically to help IT departments operate more like a business with a focus not just on their own results but on their overall impact on company processes and goals.
In fact, the expert ServiceNow engineers here at Cask have watched ServiceNow’s information technology business management (ITBM) suite get some awesome new updates that will help organizations keep up with digital transformation.
In the latest ServiceNow release, London, the extensive ITBM financial management tools will help IT leaders align their costs with business goals in three main areas:
Financial Planning
When Project and other IT groups perform budgeting, each budget owner must come to an agreement on how the entire budget should be allocated for the coming year.
ServiceNow allows its users to bring all that budgetary information and communication together in a single, transparent place. This allows you to leverage prior data, share information, and increase collaboration on the budget to save everyone time, money, and frustration.
Now that’s a good use of your budgeted time!
Financial Modeling
ServiceNow’s Financial Modeling feature utilizes customer data, or existing ServiceNow information (such as from the Configuration Management Database), to simplify the process of defining the real cost of whatever you’re modeling.
Financial Charging
The ability to provide visibility on each business units’ consumption of IT services is important to understanding an organization’s overall operations. Financial Charging enables IT to share Show Back reports with the business units it serves.
Improving spend visibility
As maturity within your ServiceNow app increases, so will the precision of spend visibility.
Each group can have their own financial roadmap to plan within ServiceNow. To help improve this experience, ServiceNow has made several overall usability improvements and updates to Prescriptive Cost Modeling and Financial Modeling:
Prescriptive Cost Models
ServiceNow’s financial management tools for IT now provide two preconfigured prescriptive cost models: an IT Shared Service Cost Model and an IT Shared Service to Application Portfolio Cost Model. Both are available right off the shelf and cloning is available so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you need to complete a financial modeling activity. You also have the ability to map your financial data source to your cost model for your financial modeling activities at the time of cloning.
Financial Modeling
To make your workflow more streamlined, with ServiceNow you can now verify how the bucket amount was assigned to a segment or an account by simply selecting the bucket name.
ServiceNow also built in an Account Scope checkbox to execute the rollup script defined for each account at the segment level. That means no more repeating similar rollup scripts for all the accounts under a segment.
Track the money that fails to reach its target account or segment in the allocation setup stage of ServiceNow’s Workbench. Use the logs to document why it failed to reach the target and the provided links to correct errors and resolve issues. Just like that, missing money analysis is actionable, user-friendly, and yet another way to look out for the business as a whole.
As a tech-first company ourselves, at Cask we get how frustrating it can be to be seen solely as a cost center. If you want to change that perception, it’s time you used the right tools to better track and communicate not just your spending but your positive impact on your organization.
Get in touch with our team of artisan engineers today to implement ServiceNow’s financial management tools and empower your IT team to become a valued player in your company’s success.
