Maximized return on IT investment
The FinOps principles and FinOps lifecycle clearly support the need for enterprise-wide participation to ensure success. But the necessity of including ITAM in the process goes even further.
Each team—procurement, ITAM, finance, IT, DevOps, or security—has a unique perspective on cloud computing. But at its core, ITAM has always leveraged data to make business and financial decisions.
ITAM and FinOps hold the same objective—maximize return on IT investments.
What’s more, ITAM is an expert at solving challenges many organizations struggle with, including how to effectively utilize chargeback and showback to create a culture of accountability, acquire clean, consistent data, and analyze it to drive optimization.
ITAM is vital to an organization because it diminishes risk, ensuring compliance with software licenses and subscriptions to avoid severe penalties. Additionally, ITAM helps companies optimize IT investments by redistributing or eliminating underutilized assets while guiding making well-informed future IT investment decisions. Finally, by establishing asset standardization company-wide, ITAM provides consistency, saving time and optimizing productivity.
ITAM possesses the skill set and expertise FinOps requires to perform its crucial tasks. The two share many similarities regarding objectives, principles, and approaches. Working together gives an organization the visibility and control needed to mitigate increasing IT complexity and cost.
However, if ITAM and FinOps do not unite and continue to operate as separate entities, opportunities to ensure maximized value from IT asset investments could be lost. With a focus on technology assets and limited visibility into the cloud, ITAM could be missing crucial data related to cost optimization. Similarly, developers or engineers may overlook software costs, creating a gap in fully factoring cloud spend.