Digital Fuel, the leader in SaaS IT Cost Visibility solutions, today announced the release of a white paper based on a major study of IT Cost Visibility by IDG Research Services, conducted in cooperation with CIO magazine. Among its major findings, the study revealed that 84% of IT managers in large organizations feel that having detailed visibility into IT costs and drivers is critical—but that over half would rate their current level of visibility into IT cost and drivers as either “fair”, “poor” or “terrible”.

The white paper, “Achieving IT Cost Visibility: Today’s Challenges and Solutions,” summarizes the findings of the IDG study and discusses how IT cost visibility is perhaps the most critical factor in better IT decision-making, from more effective cost control and budgeting to greater collaboration between IT organizations and their business unit consumers, more accurate business unit cost visibility, and the identification of pathways to better cost management for critical IT areas such as business applications, storage, and servers.

The paper also examines IT Cost Management as an accurate, reliable solution to the need for IT cost visibility. With IT Cost Management, enterprises benefit from dependable activities and processes that reveal direct, indirect and even hidden IT costs. What’s more, it helps assess and apportion those costs, giving IT cost managers the power to better manage cost-effective planning and operations.

“This white paper, and the research upon which it is based, explores the huge gap that exists between the typical company’s need for IT cost visibility and its ability to attain a satisfactory result,” said Yisrael Dancziger, President and CEO of Digital Fuel. “With greater value placed on IT cost reduction and analysis than ever before, the paper should be of interest to virtually anyone involved with IT cost management, from line managers, IT controllers and analysts to CIOs and other C-level executives.”

Key Findings

Questionnaires for IDG/CIO study were administered in August, 2009 to select executive readers of CIO magazine. Respondents were screened for employment at companies with IT budgets of $10 million or more, as well as personal involvement with the management of IT costs. Among the more revealing insights of the study, comprised of over 130 qualified responses, were the following:

• The top motivators for better IT cost visibility are to better identify cost inefficiencies in IT service delivery, to give business units more information to better control IT demand, better cost allocation due to centralization of IT services, and consolidation and/or virtualization initiatives.
• IT organizations struggle with strategies for managing IT costs, including achieving a well-defined cost model, breaking down IT costs by various dimensions, mapping IT costs to IT services, and gathering cost data from multiple sources.
• The top five areas named by respondents as requiring the greatest need for cost visibility are IT projects, business applications, application development, storage, and servers.

IT Cost Management Explained

“Achieving IT Cost Visibility: Today’s Challenges and Solutions” points to the benefits of IT Cost Management, a new discipline that gives cost managers the accurate, timely and complete information they need to make more informed spending decisions. Within two weeks of subscription, IT Cost Management, delivered by Digital Fuel as a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solution, can capture, track, assess, allocate and analyze all of the direct and indirect costs related to the full range of IT services.

The white paper also details how major corporations including Nationwide Mutual Insurance and Cummins, Inc. are saving tens of millions of dollars each year through the use of IT Cost Management. For a free downloadable copy of the white paper click here: CIO_CostVisibility_Study