In the old days, life was simple. Service organizations were running on a yearly budget. One of the reasons this was possible was predictability of costs. It was relatively easy to predict costs of employees and assets. The rate of change in organizations was relatively slow. The financial manager (CFOs did not exist back then) was able to keep track on overall costs centrally.

Fast forward 20 years and things are very different. Change is the only constant, Agile development is all over the place and cloud services are available within minutes. Many service organizations adapted to this new reality by adopting new operating models like DevOps, where teams are simultaneously responsible for development and operations of services.

Financial aspects like costs and benefits are indispensable for making well-informed decisions about changes to services. So it makes a lot of sense to make the same teams that are responsible for the delivery and operation of services also aware and (partly) responsible for the financial aspects of these services. Meet FinOps.

The main objective of FinOps is to gain financial control and predictability in a rapidly changing environment. This means that finance is an integral part of delivering services.  This also means that your service management tool needs to be able to tie all these aspects together in a meaningful way. For financial managers it becomes a key source of information rather than being dismissed as a ‘ticketing tool’ which is only relevant for support.

Your service management tool needs to be built around services, the common denominator for all stakeholders. All operational and financial data needs to be relatable to a service. The ability to generate useful financial insights and reports should be included out of the box. Any customization which violates this ability should be impossible, in order to avoid the old ‘toolbox’ fallacy where organizations went crazy with customizing their tools only to discover that process integration and useful reporting became impossible.

So if you care about monitoring and managing the costs of your services (and you should), ask yourself if your service management tool is ready to support you in your FinOps journey. And if it turns out this is not the case, we will be happy to help you and show you what 4me can do for you.

Hope to speak to you soon!