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Troux Technologies Inc. is looking to take asset management to the next level with a new IT financial management application that can better measure the costs of supporting an application or a business process.
Rather than providing static, asset-centric cost data, the Troux 4 IT Financial Management tool can create a base line that provides “comprehensive total-cost-of-ownership visibility” into an enterprise IT environment and shows “how much it costs to support resources that support business processes,” said Scott Bils, general manager for the Troux Business Value Management unit in Austin, Texas.
The financial management application, available now, uses the Troux 4 platform, which automatically creates an end-to-end base line of complex enterprise IT environments and associated costs.
The platform is made up of a blueprinting system that creates a base line of the IT infrastructure and automatically tracks changes in it, a reference model for describing entities in the enterprise architecture and their relationships to one another, a portal customized for different audiences, a reporting system, and a repository.
The repository is populated by data gathered automatically by custom collectors that access different sources, such as human resources applications, systems or application management tools, and classify the information in the Troux reference model.
“We pull that information together and build a relationship map for the physical and logical infrastructure, including people, processes [and] contracts,” said Hank Weghorst, CEO of Troux, also in Austin.
One large manufacturer working with Troux to develop the Troux 4 IT Financial Management system wanted to “see what the actual costs of operations are so we can compare one operation to another to see where we can apply some efficiencies,” said an IT executive at the company, who asked not to be named.
The manufacturer was also looking to be able to “charge out the IT services across the organization in a fair and reasonable way,” said the executive. A third goal was to learn how to support applications more effectively and understand whether “we should replace or enhance what we have,” he said.
The IT financial base line developed in Troux 4 IT Financial Management provides visibility into the total costs of ownership and spending by category, as well as spending by vendor and outsourcer. The base line allows companies to better map IT costs by identifying and connecting those costs to key business drivers, permitting a fair allocation of IT costs across lines of business.
The tool brings a new level of sophistication to asset management and can help provide “economic rationality” to IT, which historically hasnt been “terribly good” at financial management, said William Snyder, an analyst at Meta Group Inc., in Stamford, Conn.
“Once you understand your structure, you can better communicate the business value you provided,” Snyder added.