A new offering within the HP IT Financial Management (ITFM) portfolio, 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. This 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.

“Our newest FP&A solution works two ways,” said David Tan, managing director of HP Philippines. “IT organizations will be able to further streamline their businesses and track their company standing, with the help of readily available financial data. Companies who rely on IT services, meanwhile, will find that our FP&A solution validates IT as a strategic investment; with FP&A, companies can quantify how their respective IT investments have affected workplace productivity and profitability. Furthermore, FP&A assists companies in making more informed business decisions, particularly in terms of company finances. All these are necessary advantages given today’s economic conditions.”

In a recent survey by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, 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, while 66% of senior IT leaders said IT-spending transparency is “very important” to their business stakeholders, only 44% reported that their stakeholders are “very satisfied” with their organizations’ spending transparency.

“HP is helping us enhance operational and strategic decision making by identifying ways to drive more value to our business while driving out inefficiencies,” said Allan Hackney, chief information officer, John Hancock Financial Services. ”Our IT organization is better able to attract internal capital for investment by managing itself like a business in a transparent, fact-based manner.”

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 new 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 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. This helps 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.

Additionally, consulting services supply best practices to integrate data from multiple sources, providing better business insight.

New services and best practices help run IT like a business

HP provides comprehensive services for IT financial management, combining years of experience in business intelligence and service management with expertise in implementing industry-leading HP software products. They include:

• Strategy and Advisory Services- help synthesize organizational requirements, data, process and technical gaps for the purpose of developing detailed implementation roadmaps.
• Implementation Services- help customers gain new business insights for strategic decision making. Business intelligence services help customers forecast budgetary needs, quantify the value of IT services they deliver to the business, improve cost efficiency of the IT organization and better align IT resource with business needs.
• Process Consulting and Solution Implementation Services- help customers deliver improved business outcomes more quickly by rapidly deploying HP ITFM and HP PPM solutions. These services are based on the HP Service Management Reference Model.
• Best practices for Configuration Management Systems- help accelerate deployment and provide a use model for customers to automatically discover the IT assets they have and relate them to the costs of the services they are delivering.

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.

“With HP IT Financial Management, we’re driving the financial accountability of our technology organization,” said Jeffrey Johnson, deputy chief information officer and vice president of Operations and Infrastructure at Constellation Energy, a Baltimore-based supplier of energy products. “We’ve benchmarked our IT spending in relationship to our operational expenses, and it is substantially lower than that of our peers. Our unit costs – meaning cost per desktop, per server, per gigabyte of storage – have dropped 14%.”

“Customers can achieve successful IT financial management with HP’s market-leading software products and recognized consulting expertise in business intelligence, service management and IT software implementation,” said Anthony McMahon, vice president of HP Software & Solutions, Asia Pacific Japan. “We help CIOs manage the business of IT with the same rigor as any line of business.”