Pole Position in Technology Business Management

The Digital Value Model

The Serviceware Digital Value Model (DVM) begins by looking at where your company stands with its data and processes. It doesn't assume you have to use a single model that's right for everyone. It can help your company speed up and improve its digital transformation, making your processes more efficient, all for the benefit of your customers.

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Fast Track to Business Value

The Serviceware Digital Value Model helps CIOs and CFOs assess the value of their IT services and investments using data. It's about talking business benefits, not tech details, with everyone involved. It uses standard terms and best practices for planning, forecasting, allocating, cost transparency, simulation, scenarios, benchmarking, cloud cost management, vendor management, project portfolio management, and green IT sustainability. DVM combines a Technology Business Management (TBM)*-optimized data model with a range of best practices to give you a complete view of your IT services, including the people, processes, and data.

* "Technology Business Management (TBM) is a discipline that improves business outcomes by giving organizations a consistent way to translate technology investments to business value.“ (www.tbmcouncil.org)

Creating IT Cost Transparency

The Digital Value Model explained

Dr. Christopher Boortz, a specialist at Strategic Service Consulting, explains the Digital Value Cost Model from Serviceware. It's a versatile data model that uses the TBM system. It includes a wide range of key performance indicators (KPIs) for managing IT costs, ready-to-use templates for standard IT Financial Management processes, and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance these processes. It also incorporates tried-and-true consulting practices. Learn how this model can help speed up the process of digital transformation in your organization.

Digital Value Model Benefits

Creating Clarity – Empowering Control – Achieving Savings

With a full view of how your company creates value, you can track, connect, and deeply examine all the costs of your IT organization, right down to the smallest detail, using the Digital Value Cost Model. This means you can generate important decision-making information in real time.

Download the Digital Value Model poster

Using AI for Clarity

Cost-to-Value-Flow: Define how costs move from your financial system to cost categories, IT departments, and services using AI. Create transparency across your entire IT value chain, from technical services to business services to customers/products/capabilities/value streams.

Facilitating Benchmarking: Compare your data with both internal and external benchmarks to find areas that need more investigation. This helps you discover real opportunities for cost savings and improving value.

Tailored Control Logic for Agile Management

From the CIO to technical service owners, each role can steer their area using relevant reports and key performance indicators (KPIs). This allows you to actively manage IT costs and performance. Connect your decisions to the costs they lead to. Use an iterative, return-on-investment-focused, and agile approach to improve the quality and detail of your data. Start with a broad top-down view of technology spending as a default. Only add more detail where the benefits of improved data outweigh the costs of maintaining it.

Achieving Savings

Get an overview of what drives IT costs and value. Optimize the balance between cost and value by managing demands for reduced service consumption and streamlining service scope and service levels (SLAs). Optimize costs on the supply side through benchmarking service unit costs, managing vendor expenses, sourcing labor effectively, and optimizing software and hardware resources. Increase productivity in the IT Financial Management (ITFM) process through automation and workflow support.

Guidance and Measuring Success

The guidance provided by the Digital Value model ensures that your strategy is effectively put into practice. Responsibilities for making a profit, setting goals, defining key performance indicators (KPIs), and creating measures can be given to the individuals in charge of IT, Finance, HR, and other Shared Services.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are like yardsticks that help you measure how well your company is doing compared to your goals and plans. Let's look at a few important ones:

  • Spend Efficiency: This looks at how your budget changes over time, your ability to adjust costs, how much is spent by each department, and the total cost of owning services, products, and applications.
  • Execution: It checks if your spending matches the plan and if projects are within budget and on schedule.
  • Innovation: It measures how much you spend on maintaining, making changes, and innovating, and the long-term impact of these activities.
  • Cloud: This assesses how you use cloud services, how flexible your cloud costs are, and how you manage on-demand versus reserved cloud resources.
The Business View

How does IT affect our company's success and digital performance in a way we can measure?

Sample Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

  • Understanding IT Spending: See how our IT budget is divided into categories like routine operations, changes, and innovations.
  • Strategic Alignment: Measures how well projects fit our company's strategy, whether they stay on budget and on schedule, and which projects stand out as exceptional.
  • Breaking Down Costs: Looks at how IT costs are spread across different parts of our organization, like business units, in relation to the size of our teams and revenues.
The IT View

How can we make IT work better overall or in specific areas, and what exact measures can be improved?

Sample Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

  • Understanding Total Costs: Helps figure out how much it costs to own and operate our services, products, and applications.
  • Cloud Spending: Looks at how much we're spending on cloud services compared to our entire IT budget.
  • SaaS Efficiency: Checks if we're using software subscriptions effectively, based on how many instances we actually use.
     
The Finance View

How much do IT services cost, and what value do they bring? How can we make sure we charge correctly and follow the rules?

Sample Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

  • Real Spending: Helps see how much we actually spend on operating expenses (Opex) and capital expenses (Capex). It also checks the difference between what we planned to spend and what we actually spent.
  • Budget Comparisons: Shows us the reasons behind changes in our budget from the past to the present and into the future.
  • Cloud Costs: Examines whether our spending on cloud services matches what we really use.
     

Turbocharging your Digital Value Model

The ignition spark on your way from data to dashboard is the core calculation model, the Digital Value Model. It's designed to be flexible, so you can add your company's unique labels and attributes when assigning costs. At the same time, it keeps things consistent in managing your budget and demand through standardized processes, all with the aim of uncovering value-creating opportunities.

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Get on the fast track to business value

Watch a self-service demo or book a live demo with our expert consultants today to see what our financial solution can do for you.

 

Serviceware Financial

Simulation and Cost Modeling

Gain insight into service cost modeling and simulation with a concrete application example: How to easily calculate and simulate changes in the composition of your services. What happens when new employees join and are added? To what extent does this affect the cost of services?

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Serviceware Financial

Cloud Cost Management

See how you can easily identify potential savings, calculate the Total Cost of Ownership of your cloud and on-premises services, visualize the composition of services with the Visual Service Analyzer and create what-if analyses.

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