Manage costs with SAS IT Value Management

As IT investments grow to become one of the largest single elements of capital expenditure, so the CIO struggles to articulate the business value of IT to the organisation. With business managers and department heads demanding justification for every penny spent on IT, SAS IT Value Management enables the CIO and his management team to clearly present and manage the costs and value of IT in business terms.

SAS IT Value Management enables the IT department to provide governance and financial transparency, reflecting the need for IT to behave as a business in its own right. The solution uses SAS IT Resource Management to turn every scrap of raw IT data into intelligence by providing business-rich context to this information using related SAS technologies, thus quantifying the purpose and value of IT; this in turn enables the CIO and his/her team to effectively monitor and govern the organisation's IT infrastructure, while continuing to demonstrate IT's merit to the rest of the organisation.

SAS is well known in the market for its data management and analytical software, but it is still a bit of a surprise to some that the company now has 11 solution lines covering everything from customer relationship management to patent discovery and analysis. SAS also recognises that every industry is different, and distinguishes 12 discrete industries for its solutions.

The premise behind SAS IT Value Management is quite simple: enable IT to communicate and manage the tangible costs and resulting business value of every IT service. Sounds like an easy thing to do, yet for so many organisations this is impossible to do with any significant degree of granularity - and as the saying goes: "What you can't measure, you can't manage."

The SAS view on IT governance is clear: it is about how executive managers ensure IT initiatives align with business goals and deliver value, while at the same time ensuring that IT costs and fully burdened activity costs are allocated according to use. SAS solutions use the raw data collected from IT systems to link IT cost with this business value to yield the business context required for world-class IT enterprise operations.

All SAS solutions are built on three fundamental technologies: data warehousing, analytical intelligence and business intelligence. Developed by SAS over many years, these technologies are unified by an open and extensible architecture designed to support SAS solutions across the eclectic mix of platforms and technologies found in most organisations today.

Built on the SAS Intelligence Architecture, IT Value Management transforms raw IT data collected from enterprise systems into useful, business context rich intelligence. At the core of IT Value Management is SAS IT Resource Management - the company's long established computer performance management and capacity planning offering that delivers an organised and summarised IT data repository of enterprise-wide IT measurements. From here additional SAS offerings within the SAS arsenal of analytic and business intelligence capabilities are employed to perform context-rich IT governance, activity-based cost management, cost recovery, service consumption management, service level management, and IT score carding. These reporting, analyses, and modelling functions enable IT to provide accurate and defendable costs, and their resulting value, to each serviced line of business.

By providing individual business units with clear, unambiguous statements in a language they understand, business managers have the information they need to effectively manage the consumption of IT resources and so reduce cost, while for the CIO and his team these insights enable more accurate planning and long range forecasting - essential if IT is to participate in the boardroom and meet the future demands of the business as a whole.

IT Value Management not only shows how IT adds value, but also enables the organisation to optimise IT investments. Through the Balanced Scorecard, an organisation is able to achieve two-way communication: a predictive tool for management, the Balanced Scorecard reflects real-time measurement and analysis - acting as an early warning system highlighting problem areas; and for employees it translates strategy into operational objectives, measures and targets. SAS Balanced Scorecard enables executive management to apply the same performance management principles across all areas of the business - and not just IT. SAS IT Value Management uses data warehousing and ODBC (an open standard application programming interface for accessing a database) to periodically update the IT Value Management Dashboard directly from the data's source, ensuring that decisions are based on up-to-date information taken directly for the IT systems being used to run the business.

Likewise, associated governance cost and demand models are tuned over time in accordance with agreed business directions. SAS solutions are adapted to each individual customer. SAS starts with the ETL process before overlaying this onto the desired business process. ETL refers to the extract, transform and load functions combined into a single programming tool. First, the extract function reads data from a specified source and extracts a desired subset of data. Next, the transform function works with the acquired data - using rules or lookup tables, or creating combinations with other data (context) - to convert it to the desired state. Finally, the load function is used to write the resulting data (either all of the subset or just the changes) to a target database.

In Butler Group's opinion, the functionality afforded by the SAS solution is likely to provide organisations with new ways to manage cost, quality and risk.

Additional benefits envisaged:

* Reduced long-term costs - as the alignment between IT consumption, cost and resulting business value clarifies corporate IT decisions.
* Higher quality IT services - through an absolute understanding of the organisation's processes and drivers, IT consumption, and alignment with corporate objectives and strategy.
* More efficient use of IT throughout the enterprise - as unnecessary system usage abates.
* Increased awareness and professionalism within IT - as the organisation sees the direct coloration between IT investment and business value.
* Service level agreements (SLAs) can be used to prioritise IT service provision within the enterprise.

SAS IT Value Management demonstrates the continued evolution of SAS from a "technologies" vendor to a "solutions" vendor; as a result more and more users are likely to come across SAS solutions over time. The way in which SAS solutions look into the furthermost corners of the enterprise results in them seldom being considered as out-of-the box solutions, yet the fact that so many companies already have SAS solutions means that many organisations will already posses the skills required to implement SAS IT Value Management, and likewise many of the technology components will already be in place. At a very technical level, SAS continues to use portable code for the development of its products and solutions in order to ensure cross-platform flexibility, from mainframes to desktop PCs.

SAS solutions have to fit-in with existing IT investments, and so comply with the majority of IT standards to be found in the IT landscape: OLE DB for OLAP, Web services for .NET and Java, HTTP/HTTPS, and J2EE. 4 SAS - IT Value Management Major platforms supported include: OS/390, AIX, Microsoft Windows, Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux. The SAS platform scales through the use of a distributed processing model.

Splitting large time-consuming jobs into multiple packages of work and then processing these units in parallel ensures tasks are completed quickly through the use of all available resources.

SAS offers a complete range of training packages designed to provide the organisation with the skills and knowledge required to implement SAS solutions. The solutions themselves are usually well-documented and backed up with extensive support covered under the company's standard licensing policy. There are no third-party products embedded or included with SAS solutions, and all of the technology components required for SAS IT Value Management are provided by the company.