HP Solution Uses Business Analytics to Help IT Run Like a Business

New IT financial management solution helps companies increase transparency and optimize costs

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HP has released a component in its IT financial management (ITFM) portfolio to help IT executives establish financial transparency and take action in areas where they can optimize costs. The HP financial planning and analysis (FP&A) solution enables chief information officers (CIOs) to run IT like a business and demonstrate the business value of IT services. The solution brings together software and services to provide improved visibility, governance, accountability, and predictability to IT finance.

HP FP&A is the first offering in the HP ITFM portfolio designed to help IT organizations use business analytics to improve decision making, operate efficiently, and better align with the rest of the business. This transforms IT into a performance-based, metrics-driven organization.

In a recent survey of more than 200 IT leaders worldwide, nearly half of the respondents said they lack investment rigor and have no form of portfolio management in place for aligning IT investment decisions to business priorities. In addition, although 66 percent of senior IT leaders said IT-spending transparency is “very important” to their business stakeholders, only 44 percent reported that their stakeholders are “very satisfied” with their organizations’ spending transparency.

Improved Financial Governance and Transparency

HP FP&A software combines a financial planning and analysis capability linked to a financial data model. It consolidates financial information from project, asset and configuration management systems, as well as enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. This approach provides visibility of the end-to-end costs of a business service. With this visibility, CIOs can then take action to reduce variances between planned and actual spending, optimize underutilized assets, and accurately allocate IT costs to the consumers of IT services.

The software automates the process of consolidating financial information across labor and technology assets for improved financial analysis. HP FP&A can be run as a stand-alone application or in conjunction with other HP software products such as HP Project Portfolio Management Center, HP Asset Manager and HP Configuration Management System.

HP also announced a newly enhanced version of HP Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Center 8.0 software with improved financial and resource management capabilities that help customers more effectively manage IT projects and resources.

The combination of all these HP offerings increases the speed, efficiency, and accuracy of IT financial management processes, further aligning IT activity and cost with business services.

With the HP IT Financial Management portfolio, customers can:

  • Drive out inefficiencies in IT spending with financial analysis, project portfolio management, and asset management capabilities.

  • Gain cost transparency based on actual usage of IT labor and non-labor resources, as well as hardware and software.

  • Implement best practices for life-cycle investment management, financial accounting, IT execution management, waste reduction, software license optimization, and compliance.

  • Make better investment decisions and set service-level agreements that accurately factor cost, value and quality by aligning IT activity and costs with business services.

More information about HP is available at hp.com.

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