Solutions are discrete engagement or projects that are designed to deliver specific results. Often they will consist of several key deliverables, an agreed scope, schedule and cost to deliver the results required. In each case these solutions may be modified to the specific and unique needs of your business.
Connected Business Capabilities Development
Information architecture serves the needs and address the challenges of business. This approach suggests mapping information systems and applications to business architecture. Avantage builds upon this approach by incorporating the notion of business and information capabilities with maturity models and service alignment.
Conventional theory emphasizes the need for connectivity between various applications and processes. Considering this fact, our solution includes pre-defined models for Connected Business Capabilities thus providing the framework and speed to organize, evaluate and plan IT capabilities and services.
We believe in focusing on the “what” before “how” by defining business capabilities and their characteristics, before putting a plan into effect. Most architecture methodologies simply represent the current state of the business. As business changes however, the process analysis will require change as well. Avantage ensures that our underlying information architecture is agile enough to handle changes in your business. Supporting common capabilities within the organization alone ensures increased agility and consistent outcomes.
Risk Profile Analysis and Business Model Assessment
Understanding a business model, a market opportunity, a competitive threat or even just the opportunity associated with a new supplier or business partner often requires an abbreviated, yet structured approach that eliminates much of the passion and bias we see in executive decision support.
Our Risk Profile Analysis and Business Model Assessment solutions gives you a more comprehensive understanding of the opportunities and threats that affect your decision and can be applied against any of the following:
- New or revised business model,
- New or renegotiated partner/supplier relationship,
- New service or product launch,
- New market expansion.
While many methodologies focus on so-called "SWOT" analysis, the result is often a simple four-quadrant assessment of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Our solution seeks to determine the real financial impacts (positive and negative) and articulate them in a way that you can develop a strategy to mitigate and minimize the probability and impact of threats, while accelerating and maximizing the payoff of opportunities.
Cost Transparency
Make better resource decisions faster by putting actionable, current, and trusted information about IT costs at the fingertips of decision makers each month.
Begin with the Apptio Cost Transparency Foundation module to expose the true cost structure, drivers, and trends. Filter by projects, labor, vendors, application support, service management, and total costs of your infrastructure whether on-premises or in the cloud. Then, see how these foundations drive the total cost of products you deliver with the Apptio Cost Transparency Applications and Services module. Finally, drive value-oriented, fact-based conversations by seeing how applications and services support the business with the Apptio Cost Transparency Business Unit module.
IT Benchmarking
Comparing IT costs and performance against internal and external benchmarks is a critical component to measuring performance and balancing IT service capacity and capability against costs and agility.
Avantage's IT Benchmarking solution, based on the Apptio IT Benchmarking for Infrastructure application, is a SaaS application that extends Apptio Cost Transparency. It enables IT organizations to automate ongoing comparisons against a selection of industry relevant peer organizations.
IT Business Insights
Avantage's IT Business Insights solution, based on the Apptio Business Insights application, delivers deeper insight into your IT business by integrating cost, consumption, capacity utilization, and other data so you can improve and demonstrate efficiency, justify new investments, and accelerate decisions.
Knowing your true costs of providing IT products and services helps you make broad decisions about investments in technology. However, many opportunities to improve the efficient use of technology are beyond unit costs and include capacity utilization, quality, and performance. When combined with unit costs, this additional information enables service, infrastructure, and application owners to make informed cost, quality, and capacity tradeoff decisions.
Bill of IT
Cloud computing and the consumerization of technology have altered your business partners’ expectations for cost transparency. Business partners are increasingly dissatisfied with fixed allocations of IT costs, and instead want to see how their consumption drives costs so they can better understand their choices. All of this within a context of where technology aligns to their needs.
Avantage's Bill of IT solution, built on the Apptio Bill of IT application, is a SaaS application that automates the creation and delivery of pro-forma invoices for IT costs and services. With an integrated Bill of IT you can streamline your showback or chargeback process and extend your alignment with the business.
IT Planning and Budgeting
IT planning is a critical and high-value process when done well, but most IT professionals dread it. That’s because traditional approaches rely on spreadsheets and email for collaboration across teams that possess varying levels of finance expertise. Guidance is often overlooked, formula errors creep in, and version management is a nightmare for IT Finance. Long cycles drain agility from the process, and decision justification and business alignment are lost in translation, leading CIOs and budget owners alike to lose confidence in the plan’s ability to meet business priorities.
There’s a better way. Our IT Planning solution, based on the Apptio IT Planning Foundation, is an enterprise-class SaaS application designed for IT Finance teams and budget owners for annual budget, forecast, and variance tracking. It automates, centralizes, and simplifies these processes so IT teams can plan more effectively and confidently.
Partner Integrated Services
By implementing a Partner Integrated Services solution, businesses achieve a reduction in cost, and increase in utilization and improved transparency, resulting in a real competitive advantage in the market. This solution involves streamlining business services among multiple organizations, allowing them to become more efficient in their business practices.
With an increasingly competitive global business environment, many organizations need to move to the next level of business process integration to become more efficient. Doing this requires the removal of the multiple business processes that each organization currently undertakes, and in their place creating a single business process that spans both organizations.
The benefits are plentiful and result in considerable cost savings, for example:
- No duplication of process activities,
- Reduction in errors arising from data exchange,
- Greater insight into the overall business process,
- Resulting in enterprises having more employee hours to focus on customer needs.
