GRIP - IT FINANCE MANAGER

SOFTWARE AND PROCESSES FOR
RATIONALIZING YOUR SPEND

What is your challenge as you see it?

”As an IT Finance Manager, my job is often seen as a four-step mundane cycle: Baseline, forecast, compute variance, provide outlook to CIO. But my real challenge is how to question the baseline, question the variance, and to provide many alternatives of outlook scenarios to the CIO. As an IT Finance Manager, that is where I see myself as adding value. I need to have a clear picture many aspects of IT spend such as: what is planned, vs. unplanned, what is charged out vs. absorbed, what investment pays off and how much value is added for the outsourcing that we have done.”

What solutions do you have today?

”Today, we have an IT Finance Manager software solution in place – but it only captures the spend on projects and it captures ad hoc application and operations spend. We still have spreadsheets for calculating chargeback on our capital projects and we produce core vs. fixed reports. We try to compute financial metrics, but it is an academic exercise, as it is an after-thought since the expense has already been incurred.”

What exactly do you need and why is it different?

IT needs to establish financial consciousness in what is spent – for the total work that is committed, there has to be a strict eye on monthly projections on spend – and the spend has to be monitored closely. You need to have a sound financial due diligence practice that takes into account, how existing resources and infrastructure are leveraged to minimize the spend, for all incoming IT Demand. Most importantly, spend variance has to be justified on the basis of added value, architecture consolidation, as well as reuse of infrastructure, besides optimal use of resources. A Finance Manager working in isolation will not cut it. You need an integrated IT Governance solution from OpenMetrik.

What does GRIP-IT Finance Manager do? (What are its features?)

GRIP-IT Finance Manager is a web-based, easy to access, Intranet based, easy-to-access, business role-based solution that monitors every request for spend, performs due diligence on the investments and helps make sound business decisions. For the in-progress projects it captures periodic re-forecasting as well as monthly spend, aggregates them and reports them at the Line of Business level and enterprise level.

Part of the Bigger Picture…

GRIP-IT Finance Manager is part of the overarching GRIP management framework.