About the Costing Standard application

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Use the Costing Standard application to gather the facts you need to make faster business-aligned decisions, improve efficiency, and communicate value.

Introduction

Applies to: Costing Standard 11.8.x running on either TBM Studio v12 or TBM Studio v11.

The Costing Standard application transforms your general ledger entries into reports that can be used to make better decisions faster and with confidence. The reports present information about IT towers, services, and projects that can be used by IT finance, IT management, data quality owners, IT operations, and IT application and service owners. A typical report is shown in the following figure.

The application calculates the costs of the services your IT organization provides to your company. The insights gained from Costing Standard enable you to drive the actions appropriate to your business goals.

The Costing Standard application provides:

  • A well-defined prescriptive approach that incorporates Technology Business Management (TBM) best practices.
  • High-quality content ready out of the box, such as reports, metrics, and key performance indicators.
  • An easy-to-understand model of the flow of money through your business.
  • Efficient time to value to get insights into your business.
  • A solid base for future expansion in the evolution of your TBM journey.

Costing Standard modules

The Costing Standard application includes three modules:

Costing Standard Foundation
Automate monthly views of IT financial performance against plan (budget) and what drives the costs for your towers, projects, labor, cost centers, and more.
Applications & Services
Automate monthly analysis and reporting of the fully loaded costs and cost drivers for your applications and services and manage their performance against a plan (budget).
Business Units
Automate monthly analysis and reporting of spending by business unit to understand your costs in the context of value and business plans (IT budget allocations).

What you can do with the Costing Standard application

The Costing Standard application delivers the insights you can use to make the right decisions for a business.

IT Executives
Determine how to demonstrate the business value to the organization that IT provides, and where they can shift from Run The Business strategies to Transform the Business strategies.
IT Service Domain Owners
Determine how to increase the return on assets, how to track business growth, and where the business or infrastructure should be right-sized to meet the demand of the services.
Finance
Spend more time on data analysis instead of data collection.

If you are upgrading from R11.8.x

There are several significant changes to the Costing Standard application running on the v12 platform.

  • Master reports no longer show the collection navigation bar.
  • The IT Finance-Waterfall report no longer is included. Waterfall reports are not supported by the v12 platform at this time.
  • You no longer can upload a file on the Data Quality report. This also is not supported by the v12 platform at this time.
  • When you create a new project, there no longer will be a Next Steps page.
  • A Service Library no longer is required.