Unlocking Cost Transparency: The TCO Dashboard

Today's dynamic business environment driven by technological evolution increasingly requires companies to adapt to more agile business practices and develop their large data handling capabilities. In this, IT and its financial management have taken on an important and central role, with companies globally launching initiatives to develop a strong digital core premised upon digitalisation and migration to cloud-based solutions. These developments are intended to enhance organisational efficiency through streamlining processes.

However, our experience has shown us that the proliferation of complex digital systems in business environments does not automatically entail neither the leveraging of more efficient processes, nor access to deeper insights into a company's IT operations. In particular, IT systems across different business domains are often disparate and separate from one another, with the data contained in these systems unprepared for use in a consolidated reporting. This makes it difficult to generate insights needed to manage IT costs effectively.

A TCO Dashboard provides insights into the actual cost of operating an IT service. Acting as a bridge between IT and Finance, the dashboard consolidates various data sources that would otherwise remain disconnected.

But why is a TCO Dashboard needed? From our experience, there is a growing need for more actionable cost conversations to be taking place between the business and IT based on comprehensible data for both departments. Think of an easy example - for any of your organisation’s IT services, is it possible to easily pinpoint which licenses or what infrastructure are directly connected to the service? Is it possible to accurately identify what the exact quantity or cost amount is contributing to operating the service? Usually, this information is distributed across various departments, multiple owners and non-unified data sources. This makes it difficult to generate comprehensive and accurate insights into IT inventory and financial data when the gathering and co-ordinating of this information comes at the cost of highly intensive, manual work.

Our TCO Dashboard addresses this issue by centralising information from different organisational areas within one platform. This not only helps with digitalisation and working within an agile context, but also ensures the business value of IT services can be leveraged. In order to unite disparate information, the core functionality of Intero's TCO dashboard is centred around the systematic mapping of costs to a central IT product. Below is a representation of how this process works:

In order to bring greater clarity, the mapped data is sorted according to a taxonomy that organises the information into categories, such as labour or infrastructure. Our article exploring understanding IT costs may be referred to for further information on typical cost categories for IT services. This taxonomy has been developed based on our extensive industry experience and knowledge of the most common cost pools within organisations. We have found that using a standard taxonomy framework enables different departments to speak the same language and find common ground. 

Each of the cost categories allows for allocated costs to be broken down into further, granular layers. For example, costs allocated to an infrastructure element could be further decomposed into development or production costs. This multi-layered cost breakdown leverages a tripartite approach to cost transparency from Finance, IT and Business perspectives.

Intero’s model and taxonomy is integrated into a dashboard designed with user-centricity at the forefront, with the dashboard layout and visualisations having been carefully constructed so as to maximise the value for the end-users. Below are some key topics that characterise our dashboard:

A strong, cost-efficient digital core becomes ever-more essential to every-day business. The implementation of a TCO Dashboard subsequently provides a multitude of invaluable benefits:

These benefits have a positive impact on operational efficiency, cost ownership and a company’s competitive edge, allowing companies to make more informed decisions about its IT. If you can relate to one or more of the challenges mentioned above or if you are interested in an individual presentation of our portfolio, we are happy to help.