FinOps and ITFM: making your IT costs readable, attributable and manageable.
Managing IT economics is not only about cutting spend. The point is above all to understand where the money goes, what it contributes to, who consumes it and what decisions can be taken on that basis. BleuLemon supports IT departments in setting up FinOps and ITFM approaches, from structuring the cost model through to day-to-day management, with IBM Apptio or with the tools already in place in your organisation.
IBM Silver Partner · Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner · Paris and Lyon, since 2008
ITFM and FinOps: two complementary approaches.
ITFM (IT Financial Management) and FinOps are different, complementary concepts.
| Criterion | ITFM (IT Financial Management) | FinOps |
|---|---|---|
| Question asked | What does our IT cost, and for which services or business lines? | Is our cloud consumption justified and optimised? |
| Scope | The whole IT portfolio: licences, infrastructure, applications, projects, service contracts | Public cloud resources and services |
| Rhythm | Budget, forecasts, internal cross-charging and long-term management | Short cycles and regular consumption monitoring |
| Who is involved | IT director, CFO, management control and business departments | In addition to the people above: product teams, architects, service owners and cloud owners |
| Deliverables | Cost models, cost allocation (showback), budget, dashboards | Consumption analysis, allocation, optimisation and monitoring |
| IBM Apptio tool | ApptioOne | Cloudability |
| What its absence reveals | A budget that is hard to defend and hard to settle at executive committee | A cloud bill that rises with no explanation |
The difference can be put simply: FinOps helps steer cloud consumption; ITFM structures the overall economic understanding of IT. The two approaches complement each other naturally.
Making invoices understandable.
Making budgets understandable.
An IT budget becomes genuinely manageable when it can be linked to what the organisation consumes and to the services it delivers.
We work in particular on:
The aim is not only to produce figures. It is to have information clear enough to support a conversation between the IT department, finance and the business.
Understand, scope, deploy, drive adoption, keep it alive.
Our framework has five stages, and the last counts as much as the first.
We start by mapping spend, the data sources available, the allocation rules already in use and the difficulties teams run into. In particular we look to understand what is visible today, what is not, and which decisions are hard to take for want of reliable information.
We define the scope, the cost model, the analysis dimensions, the allocation rules and the responsibilities. This stage also determines which indicators are genuinely useful: the cost of a service, consumption by business line, how a budget moves, cloud consumption, forecasts or variances. The model comes before the tool.
We implement the model on the organisation's real data and build the dashboards suited to the different users. Depending on the context, we can rely on IBM Apptio, Cloudability or the tooling already in place. We move forward step by step so that the first results are usable quickly, then enrich the model.
A financial model is only worth something if it is understood and used. We support budget owners, IT teams and finance contacts in reading the data and the dashboards, so that they can explain costs, challenge variances and take their decisions without depending on the consultancy.
Services, organisations and costs change. The model therefore has to be maintained: new services brought in, allocation rules adjusted, dashboards developed and indicators reviewed regularly. The aim is for this kind of management to become normal practice in the organisation, not a one-off exercise.
IBM Apptio: industrialising financial management.
BleuLemon is an IBM Silver partner and works on several components of the Apptio suite. We use these tools where they match the need, but the technology choice comes after the model and the governance have been scoped.
ApptioOne structures an economic model of IT, consolidates costs and links them to the services, products or business lines that consume them. It suits ITFM approaches in particular, and environments where several financial sources have to be consolidated.
Cloudability is designed for FinOps management of public cloud environments. It tracks consumption, improves cost allocation, spots under-used resources and identifies drift.
Targetprocess is IBM Apptio's strategic portfolio management solution. It connects strategy, investments, programmes and the work of teams, and integrates with the Apptio ecosystem to bring portfolio management and financial management together.
As a certified partner, we support you in implementing Apptio solutions in your organisation.
The right solution is not the one we would rather implement, but the one that lastingly finds its place in your organisation.
What an IT cost dashboard looks like.
The dashboard below shows a cost model as it is built in ApptioOne: spend by domain, the Run share, the gap between the approved budget and the budget consumed, and spend with no owner. (these figures do not come from a real case)
Demonstration data: these figures illustrate how a cost model is read and do not represent any BleuLemon client.
The questions we answer
A question that finds no answer here is dealt with in a thirty-minute conversation, about your actual context rather than a general case.
Talk to an expertWhat is the difference between FinOps and ITFM?
FinOps focuses mainly on managing cloud consumption and works on short cycles. ITFM covers all IT costs more broadly and seeks to connect them to the organisation's services, products and business lines. The two are complementary: FinOps gives a detailed reading of cloud consumption, while ITFM places it within a wider economic view.
How do you start a FinOps or ITFM programme?
We advise starting by scoping the problem to be solved. We identify the data available, the spend concerned, the people involved, the indicators expected and the decisions the future arrangement has to support. From there we define a first scope narrow enough to produce usable results quickly.
Is FinOps only about saving money?
No. Cutting waste is part of the subject, but the main aim is to understand and steer spend better. A cost increase can be entirely justified if it matches an increase in usage or the creation of value. FinOps is precisely what makes it possible to tell useful spend from avoidable spend.
Do you need to use IBM Apptio to work with BleuLemon?
No. We can build or develop your management model on the tooling already in place. Our partnership with IBM lets us deploy ApptioOne or Cloudability where they suit your context, but we never start with the choice of tool.
Should you start with FinOps or ITFM?
It depends on your problem. If your main difficulty is cloud consumption that is moving fast or that you do not control well, FinOps can be the right starting point. If your issue is understanding the IT budget as a whole, allocating costs or holding a conversation with the business and with finance, ITFM is usually a better fit. The two can then be joined in a common model.
What is showback?
Showback means making the costs consumed by an entity, a business line or a service visible, without necessarily charging them back. It gives resource consumers accountability by showing them clearly what they consume and how it changes.
Can IT costs be connected to the project portfolio?
Yes. It is in fact one of the benefits of more mature economic management: bringing costs, budgets, projects, products and available capacity together. We can rely on TargetProcess (IBM Apptio suite) or on other portfolio management tools such as Jira Align to make that connection.
What role does AI play in managing IT costs?
AI can help identify anomalies, unusual movements or inconsistencies in the data more quickly. It can also make it easier to analyse large volumes of financial or consumption information. It remains an aid to management, however: a budget decision or a trade-off between investments remains a human decision, taken from the context and the priorities of the organisation.
Going further: our services · The Assessment · project & portfolio management