IT organizations often lack an understanding of the needs of their customers from a business perspective. And business unit executives typically have little visibility or control into what they are spending on IT and what they are getting in return — weakening IT's relationship with the business and fueling the perception of IT as a cost center.
newScale DemandCenter™ enables IT and the business to share a common understanding of how available IT services align with business needs, to create agreement on criteria for success, and to provide a proactive approach to planning for future demand. With newScale DemandCenter, relationship managers can establish these shared objectives, set expectations, negotiate pricing, forecast demand, establish budgets, and track service consumption for each business unit customer.
With newScale DemandCenter, relationship managers can now collaborate with the business to plan and continuously adjust demand based on changing business needs. By providing visibility and ensuring more effective demand forecasting for IT services, they can help moderate consumption and uncover future service needs. And IT financial managers can establish service-based pricing, track budgets versus actuals, manage allocations, and even implement charge-backs for their business customers.
It all starts with the Service Catalog — as the foundation and first step in this journey to improved IT-business alignment. While other vendors claim to provide a Service Catalog, their approach isn't much more than a list of services in a table or database. And still others claim to have a Service Catalog, yet they merely offer a self-service extension to their help desk ticketing system to enable request fulfillment
IT demand management is an important start and a valuable foundation, but it is just the beginning. When combined with newScale RequestCenter which provides a self-service portal for the orderable services that can be requested by end users, only newScale provides a complete integrated Service Catalog and Service Portfolio solution for the entire service lifecycle.
The newScale DemandCenter™ application provides essential tools that relationship managers - and their counterparts in IT finance - need to improve the IT-business relationship. newScale DemandCenter is a family of solutions that includes:
- newScale Demand Manager™ provides the ability to track and manage IT consumption, cost trends and analyze the consumption of IT services for each business unit customer — highlighting deviations between forecasted IT demand and actual service consumption. With their personalized view into the Service Catalog, business customers can evaluate service options, tiers, and cost drivers to make informed service choices. They can review agreements and assess the pricing impact of higher service levels — and update forecasts based on their needs.
- newScale Relationship Manager™ is used to establish agreements tailored for each customer, including objectives that relate to key business drivers, service-based pricing with optional tiers of service, and forecasted demand based on historical consumption.
- newScale Financial Manager™ manages IT Financials with support for budgeting process using service-based pricing rather than just high-level allocations. IT financial managers can establish pricing and budgets for each service offering — and provide ongoing visibility into budgets versus actual spend for each customer.
To learn how newScale DemandCenter fits within the end-to-end lifecycle of IT service management, go to Service Strategy and Design Solutions.
