IT Success!: Towards a New Model for Information Technology

7.7. Ongoing cost–benefit analysis for applications

Once a project is delivered, the resulting applications are essentially financial assets, whose performance in terms of costs and benefits will be monitored by the application manager (defined in the next chapter on roles and responsibilities) to realize the business case.

It is important at this stage to differentiate between the financial assets just described, and the underlying technology assets like hardware and software, which might sit in a configuration management database (CMDB) or an IT asset management (ITAM) system. The former is the visible end product that the business client sees and uses and from which she will derive business benefit. The latter is a means to that end, and is often invisible to the client. Which makes sense – after all, as important as these physical assets are in terms of what they do, as far as the client is concerned they are ultimately 'part of the plumbing'. There is still an unfortunate tendency in many IT departments to view assets mainly from their traditional, 'physical things' perspective. Yes, you have to be able to manage and track these physical assets in order to manage your cost base and your service levels, but beyond that they have no intrinsic business value. However, order entry application XYZ which is supposed to handle a throughput of so many orders at a given unit cost – now that is an asset with intrinsic business value. An analogy is your car, which can be considered ...