IT Financial Management

HPE IT Executive Scorecard IT Financial Management (ITFM) data is gathered from the relevant data sources and calculated according to the finance KPIs related to the Financial Management Context (universe). ITFM is a component of HPE IT Executive Scorecard. These KPIs have KPI breakdowns. The KPI breakdowns are used to provide overview data in the Financial Summary page in the Dashboard.

The Financial Summary page in the Dashboard has three tiers containing financial components. The first tier displays a high level view of the data for the selected year. The second tier is a monthly drill down of the first tier. The third tier shows charts and tables that provide a more detailed view of the data. These are described below.

Financial Summary

The Financial Summary Page in the Dashboard provides an organization’s CIO, IT Financial Manager, IT Financial Analyst, and IT Manager with a view of how their business services, organizations, customers, and programs are doing from the perspective of staying within a defined financial Plan of Record (PoR).

The page displays information on all costs independently of their context (Business Service, Organization, Program, or Customer).

The ITFM Dashboards help answer business questions such as the following:

• What is the actual versus planned cost for the Business Services, Organizations, Programs, or Customers with the biggest budgets?
• How accurate is our planning?
• In what areas were expenses greater than anticipated?
• What are the capitalized expenses compared to the operational expenses (CapEx or OpEx)?
• What are the discretionary expenses compared to the non-discretionary expenses?
• What is the year over year comparison of actual versus planned costs between top 10 locations?

The Dashboards let users view planned-vs-actual performance for customers, IT organizations, business services, and programs. To help focus management attention, users can also use Dashboards to view the customers, IT organizations, business services, programs, and cost categories that have the highest positive variance.

The other components present the distribution of the service cost by:

• Business Service
• Organization
• Program
• Customer

These options help the user address the question “What is the planned-vs-actual cost for the Business Services, Organizations, Programs, or Customers with the biggest budgets?” in context of the options.

Users can also see year-over-year comparison of planned-vs-actual costs between top 10 locations, including overtime cost distribution and year-over-year planned-vs-actual cost.

The complete ITFM package contains different applications that enable management to perform advanced analyses using data extracted from HPE applications. ITFM uses an integrated version of SAP® BusinessObjects Enterprise XI to complete the extract, transform, load (ETL) processes and format out-of-box and ad hoc analytics.

Summary of IT Financial Management Features

Feature	Description
IT Financial Management (ITFM)	HPE IT Executive Scorecard component that provides IT stakeholders with actionable cost information that supports effective cost containment and investment decisions. It includes IT cost consolidation, IT cost allocation, allocation scenarios, budgeting, IT cost dashboards, Cost Explorer, analytics, and integration with HPE Asset Manager, HPE Project and Portfolio Management, and alternate source data in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
Data	Imports historical incident, project, and financial data into the data warehouse to populate scenarios and analytics. The data warehouse stores data that originates in disparate external applications but undergoes transformation when extracted and consolidated using a newly designed ETL process managed by the data warehouse.
Application Infrastructure	Applications run in a single framework with a single navigation pane that accesses different components, out-of-box analytics, and SAP® Business Objects Enterprise XI in an integrated environment.

ITFM includes several ways to analyze the allocation results. For financial analysts, ITFM offers a streamlined interface called Cost Explorer that helps the analyst answer ad hoc questions quickly. For business users and IT management, ITFM offers out-of-box analytics that show important financial data concerning entities such as organizations and business services. ITFM also offers a dashboard that helps users quickly identify IT financial areas that require attention. The HPE IT Executive Scorecard ITFM component has these features:

• IT cost consolidation: ITFM allows an organization to consolidate planned and actual costs in a single system. It gives IT the big picture as well as the detail it needs to more effectively manage budget performance.
• IT cost allocation: With the ITFM allocation engine, IT can distribute cost across multiple cost models giving it the ability to analyze budget performance from many angles.
• Allocation scenarios: Users can create multiple “what-if” allocation scenarios and use the results to compare budget versions against actual costs and budget objectives.
• Budgeting: The ITFM budgeting feature enables IT finance managers to plan a budget for three different planning time frames: one, two, or three years.
• IT cost dashboard: The ITFM Dashboard lets IT executives view planned versus actual performance for IT overall, by customer, by IT organization, by service, by program, and by project. IT executives can also see the areas with the highest variance to help focus their management attention.
• Cost explorer: The ITFM Cost Explorer allows IT finance and cost analysts to systematically explore cost variance by organization, business service, application, program, project, cost center, and cost category, as well as other dimensions. By slicing and filtering data across multiple dimensions, analysts can gain new insight into what is driving costs, where the largest variance to plan is taking place, and why the variance might be happening.
• IT cost analytics: Through Web Intelligence analytics, users can see daily updates on planned versus actual performance. Users can modify the out-of-box analytics as necessary to support the specific cost analysis needs of their organization. Users can also perform ad hoc analysis of cost data to answer less common questions while knowing that the data they are seeing is consistent across all users.
• Out-of-box integrations with HPE Asset Manager software, HPE Project and Portfolio Management software make gathering cost data more efficient. Integration processes keep the data current.