How to Manage Corporate IT Spend

In this business case we use a real world example of global company that has presence in six continents with spend over 52 countries. We collect data from various sources within the organization such information about how sales organization is organized under different countries and regions, how the cost structure and cost coding of company expenses is tabled, and the financial management application that contains data for planned versus budget and forecast, and finally we integrate data from 52 different countries with 7 different ERP systems in at least 5 languages into a spend data lake. We have loaded the various sources of data, transformed the data into relatable SQL semantic model (see below).

After conducting a data exploration exercise using AI enabled tools to quickly identify, errors, duplications, and anomalies, we cleaned the dataset and created the semantic model. We have structured the information in such a way to create a snowflake diagram with subset tables for financial Scenarios, dates, IT area, Department, Country/Region. and Business Areas. We then created dashboard to summarize data by area of spend, location, region, and IT spend area. We then drilled down to additional details about variance (Actual-Budget) or Latest Estimate(for instance LE1 stands for Q1 forecast, and LE2 stands for Q2 Forecast).

In the video below, I present insights on managing corporate IT budgets using integrated datasets and SQL for a global organization. Over the past year, corporate total spend reached approximately $260 million, with notable variances across different functional areas. For instance, we spent $24 million over budget on infrastructure, which we need to address in our future strategies. This can give us insights on how to look for these variances to inform cost optimization and create subsets of specific category management strategies for the upcoming years.

This simple and highly functional semantic model can be deployed as an App within your on-premises IT environment and connected via data pipelines to provide near-real time updates of the spend month over month and year over year to allow you to dynamically manage your IT corporate budget in real-time and identify shortcomings beforehand.

See video below

How to Manage Your Corporate IT Budget

If you need to manage your Corporate IT Budget better, please reach to us at sid@elbazconsultancy.com.