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By Laton McCartney
A lot of organizations talk about the need to run their IT departments like a business, but John Hancock Financial Services is taking major steps to make this happen.
The Boston-based insurer is one of the early users of HP's recently introduced Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A), part of what it calls its IT Financial Management portfolio. "It enables CIOs to run IT like a business and demonstrate the business value of IT services," says HP's Ken Cheney, who heads up product marketing for the ITFM solution. "The solution brings together software and services to provide improved visibility, governance, accountability and predictability to IT finance."
"HP has built a capable financial analytics product using the Business Objects platform, plugged it into their existing software solutions for Project Portfolio management and IT Asset management," Forrester Vice President Peter O'Neill told CIOZone.
JH is using the solution to prove financial transparency and improve efficiencies. "It's incumbent on us to provide services as economically as possible," Donna Alexander, John Hancock's vice president of IT finance, told CIOZone.
With the transparency provided by FP&A. John Hancock can now clearly show the cost of services and the impact of these investments on the company's on-going operations, Alexander says. Employing business intelligence and analytics, it can also serve as a valuable tool in asset management, planning and budget consolidation and analysis. This transforms IT into a performance based, metrics-driven organization.
When different John Hancock business units procure services, they do so through a service catalogue that lists an inventory of all available IT services and functions a module of the ITFM suite. The catalogue serves as "the front-end to assets and services," Alexander says.
Once the service has been acquired, John Hancock has visibility to its the end to end, full lifecycle costs, With this visibility, the company can take action to reduce variances between planned and actual spending. "We can move quickly and that's a real benefit," says Alexander.
"HP is helping us enhance operational and strategic decision making by identifying ways to drive more value to our business while driving out ineffiencies, "Allan Hackney, John Hancock's CIO stated. "Our IT organization is better able to attract internal capital for investment by managing itself like a business in a transparent, fact-based manner."
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