Heading into 2024, agility, accuracy and efficiency have become the foundational factors for businesses to successfully manage IT expenditure. When these three factors are combined, it enables stakeholders to make fast, data-driven decisions based on a better understanding of their total IT costs. Organizations also gain the flexibility to pivot quickly so that operations can be optimized and time, cost or resource savings can be achieved. Unlock all of this during 2024 and you’ll benefit from being financially secure and well-equipped to drive growth.
Let’s dive a bit deeper to take a look at the top five IT Financial Management (ITFM) and Technology Business Management (TBM) trends we expect to see take priority this year:
1. ITFM becomes recognized as a catalyst for technology evolution
ITFM continues to gain momentum amongst IT and Finance leaders as they harness this to streamline their accounting and financial management. According to the 2023 RIA study, 53% of enterprises are now using or piloting ITFM solutions. Business leaders are recognizing that ITFM drives innovation across the company by providing cost transparency to justify technology investments, proven methods to measure the true value of each expenditure and routes to optimize workloads.
ITFM solutions help maximize the value of every dollar spent and when it comes to activating cloud-first strategies, knowing the value of your public cloud investments will be a huge advantage over 2024. ITFM also reduces waste and helps leaders make informed decisions about future IT strategies, portfolios and resources. With ITFM, it becomes far easier to identify the best and worst value streams and address areas with too much or too little capacity. Armed with this information, leaders can confidently persuade others and secure buy-in to redirect expenditure and accelerate business performance and agility.
2. Cost transparency and accountability will increase business productivity ten-fold
In the world of IT finance, knowledge is everything and we expect leaders to fully embrace that data is king this year and transparency is queen. With data transparency, you can set clear, achievable goals and assign accountability to teams or individuals to ensure these goals are met. ITFM helps stakeholders understand what the costs are on day zero, meaning you can monitor the costs of running each system in real-time and therefore plan to better align spending with revenue-generating business goals.
Through providing greater transparency across the business, one of Serviceware’s customers was able to reduce the questions and time taken to help different areas of the business by 95% as the information was more consumable and easier to access.
3. Improved cloud cost management and a strengthened relationship with FinOps
Financial Operations (FinOps) is a relatively new discipline within ITFM that oversees the complex financial aspects of cloud infrastructure and services. The State of FinOps survey found that only 13% of respondents had a mature FinOps program, so we anticipate businesses to focus more on their FinOps and cloud technologies strategy in 2024 to ensure the total cost of business services is captured.
Managing FinOps expenses will be critical in making sure that processes for purchasing are in place and data collection is standardized for accurate reporting. Integrating this data into a broader TBM framework will elevate an organization's cloud financial management and maximize SaaS, IT infrastructure, services and resource investments across the business.
4. AI, data analytics and automation continue to shape ITFM and TBM
AI is on most trend lists for 2024 and rightly so. AI is creating a paradigm shift in the way businesses operate, process data and harness automation to enable greater agility, efficiency and accuracy to be achieved. During the 2023 Gartner Symposium, Gartner predicted that 80% of CIOs and tech executives plan full adoption of generative AI within 3 years, and we at Serviceware suspect that a lot of this adoption will happen this year.
Specifically for ITFM and TBM solutions, AI will open up exciting opportunities such as automating manual processes to help reduce workloads, increase the quality of data and assist in predicting and forecasting performance results. And, let’s not ignore the speed at which all of this can happen. Things that once took months and weeks can be completed in seconds! Data-driven decisions can be made in minutes enabling an organization to identify cost-savings, pivot quickly and boost operational efficiency in a fraction of the time it would have taken them. Serviceware has already developed AI capabilities in its solutions and will be investing further in this space over 2024.
5. ITFM becomes the next step for organizations on their ITSM / EAM journey
Keeping track of all IT Service Management (ITSM) and enterprise assets is becoming increasingly complicated for IT teams as companies drive forward with digital transformation projects, move to cloud environments and digitize business processes. This requires a lot of different systems, implementations and planning, but is also essential for running an efficient business.
The next logical step for businesses is to ensure all of these new investments are working effectively and providing value back to the business. This is where ITFM becomes increasingly important. Not only does it ensure transparency for stakeholders and clearly show value for money, but it can also help with future planning, ultimately increasing business productivity and the bottom line. Serviceware believes more stakeholders will come to this realization in 2024.
To see a demonstration of Serviceware’s platform and understand how this could accelerate value for your business in 2024, get in touch today.
