Integrating Business Intelligence with Enterprise Technology Management
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Use Case Integrating Business Intelligence with Enterprise Technology Management CONTENTS Why ETM Data is Now Crucial for BI ETM and BI Integration Use Cases Conclusion: Integrating ETM and BI Unlocks the Strategic Insights from IT Assets Introduction and Context In the enterprise, nearly all work flows through IT systems. As every business undergoes some degree of digital transformation, their reliance on these systems becomes more pronounced. Not surprisingly, how companies are using their IT assets and pulling insights from consumption patterns and costs has become a critical strategic capability. Smart CIOs now understand the power of the information and insights that they can extract from IT assets and systems. Modern Enterprise Technology Management (ETM) is designed to provide a fully integrated and holistic view across what had been previously siloed data sources (SAM, MDM, ITAM, etc.) in order to provide management with timely insight in support of security, compliance and employee enablement. This extensibility allows IT teams to create accurate, properly reconciled and continuously updated golden databases of all enterprise IT asset information and data. The same APIs and connectors that make it possible for CIOs to create a single pane of glass for all ETM functions also can feed data into analytics engines and Business Intelligence (BI) tools. BI tools are purpose built to identify key patterns and insights that can help inform smarter business decisions. IT data and patterns have traditionally been an opaque region where data was trapped in spreadsheets or spread across multiple siloed systems.
Integrating Business Intelligence with Enterprise Technology Management
With a BI integration, several novel use cases for ETM have emerged including:
Real-time IT and Consumption and usage Project reporting and agile Workforce productivity
infrastructure dashboards by business project management for metrics through
cost tracking unit or geography resource planning the lens of IT
Why ETM Data is Now Crucial for BI
For the past four decades, starting with the desktop PC era, businesses have relied on IT for workers to do their jobs.
This is true even for enterprises producing physical goods, like factories, or for jobs where the primary service is not
delivered via IT, such as healthcare. The COVID-19 pandemic radically accelerated this trend towards digitization of
business processes and production. For a large percentage of the modern workforce, the majority of their workday
is spent touching one or more IT assets. Equally important, the work they do in those assets can provide rich insights
into enterprise efficiency, employee productivity, and financial trends related to IT asset consumption and usage.
Unlike legacy measurement systems, modern BI can provide real-time insights into key business metrics such as
daily sales, units produced, or dollar spend on any cost center. Integrating BI with modern ETM can enhance those
real-time and near-real-time measurements with IT asset utilization and purchase data. For Cloud-native businesses
such as SaaS, online games and media, IT is the lifeblood of their business and one of the best sources of information
on overall business health. ETM systems that are agentless and can ingest all types of APIs and connector data have
a distinct advantage because they are designed to provide a flexible foundation for managing and orchestrating both
legacy technology modalities, such as installed software, devices and hardware, and modern technology types such
as browser-delivered SaaS products and cloud infrastructure and networking.
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Integrating Business Intelligence with Enterprise Technology Management
ETM and BI Integration Use Cases
Tightly integrating ETM and BI to enable granular and continuous analysis of IT asset data enables dozens of use
cases touching finance, security, IT, HR, sales and marketing. Here are a handful of use cases with a high likelihood
of business impact for most enterprises.
Real-time IT and infrastructure cost tracking
IT and digital infrastructure costs represent a growing and significant line item for businesses.
According to Flexera, the average business is spending roughly 8% of revenues on IT assets and services.
As companies continue to shift to cloud computing models and away from older CapEx models to more
flexible OpEx IT models with elastic infrastructure, tracking spending and financial exposure at a more
granular level becomes critical. By integrating ETM and BI, IT teams allow CFOs and FP&A teams to
eliminate the translation step between exporting IT data and building or updating financial models.
Consumption and usage dashboards by business unit or geography
What technology tools workers and product teams choose to use and how much they use them provides
rich insights into the effectiveness of IT strategies as enablers for business productivity. It is also a useful
proxy for prevalence of Shadow IT and other behaviors that may impact an enterprise security stance.
Rich consumption data also simplifies resource planning and procurement strategies. Integrating ETM
data with BI will allow for creation of dashboards and visualizations that map directly into budgeting
tools and streamline processes requiring insights into IT asset usage.
Project reporting and agile project management for resource planning
ETM that ingests data from project management tools such as Jira and combines it with IT asset data
can provide insights into the progress and success of IT initiatives. Because IT initiatives can be opaque,
having a clear path for these insights from ETM over to BI tools can elevate visibility for business leaders
and the C-suite and help them better understand what’s really going on in IT projects. This, in turn, allows
the finance team to understand and plan for project cost fluctuation, and to identify which projects are
succeeding and which are failing.
Workforce productivity metrics through the lens of IT
Because workers are reliant on their IT systems, their ability to access IT tools has a direct impact on
overall enterprise productivity. For example, how much time employees spend either waiting for IT assets
they need to do their jobs is an excellent metric for how efficient an IT team is at keeping employees on the
job. Measuring time from start date to asset assignment can also highlight whether HR processes and
handoffs of employee onboarding needs to IT is working as intended. By integrating ETM and BI, HR
and management teams can track and visualize these key metrics.
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Integrating Business Intelligence with Enterprise Technology Management
Conclusion: Integrating ETM and BI Unlocks the Strategic
Insights from IT Assets
As the enterprise world moves to become more and more digital, work products and processes increasingly are
composed of and measured in the digital realm. IT assets provide an invaluable window into this digital world and
a source of truth on many matters that have strategic and financial importance to enterprises. Extracting IT asset
data and making it more useful is best accomplished by integrating systems that aggregate, clean and reconcile
this data with systems designed to make sense of business data—Business Intelligence solutions. This becomes
more crucial as IT becomes a larger and larger percentage of overall spending inside of enterprises. A BI and ETM
integration can dramatically simplify the path to useful insights that drive smarter decision making, improved
process management, and better resource allocation.
Oomnitza is the first Enterprise Technology Management solution that provides a single source of truth
for endpoints, applications, cloud, networking, and accessories. Our customers can orchestrate lifecycle
processes, from purchase to end-of-life, across all IT assets, ensuring their technology is secure, compliant,
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and optimized, enabling their employees. Oomnitza is headquartered in San Francisco, CA.
© 2021 Oomnitza, Inc. All rights reserved.
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