Demand management is the next frontier in IT cost efficiency. For years, CIOs have focused on squeezing more costs out of the supply side of IT. But demand for IT services continues to increase and effectively outpace the gains of those cost containment efforts - causing even greater strain on already anemic IT budgets. IT's need for effective demand management is more pressing than ever and the demand side is the next major source of cost savings.
It makes sense that any business must balance orders for its products and services (i.e., demand) with its ability to produce them in terms of resource and capacity constraints (i.e., supply). Otherwise it may produce too little of what is required, too much of what is not required, or deliver late, or have problems with quality and customer satisfaction.
To run as a business within the business, enterprise IT organizations must do the same. Historically, IT has focused solely on the supply side of the equation. But without visibility into demand, how can IT answer capacity planning questions like: how many physical hosts will be required to accommodate the demand for new virtual machines? Or, how many new laptops will you need to meet new employee onboarding needs?
The problem for IT is that to make good capacity plans they need to understand the future needs of the business. The problem for everyone is that there hasn't been an easy way to forecast this potential IT demand. Demand management not only helps IT organizations to shape demand, it also helps them plan for demand and respond to changes in demand to meet business needs while controlling their IT budgets. This increased visibility into demand can help ensure more accurate and
business-driven capacity planning.
Industry experts and analysts agree that the best practices for demand management start with defining standardized services, exposing those services to customers via an IT Service Catalog, controlling and shaping demand through guided self-service, and providing cost transparency through showback or chargeback. The result: greater adoption of cost-effective service options, consumption choices that result in lower IT costs, and effective planning to meet business needs and minimize over-capacity.
newScale Service Catalog solutions are uniquely designed to help IT with this challenge by providing the business with informed consumption choices, guiding the IT consumer to the right choices, reducing custom requests, forecasting future demand, and enabling demand-driven capacity planning. With newScale, IT can provide visibility into the costs of different service options and tiers of service, a self-service ordering process with controls and governance, a simple mechanism to view the services requested and terminate service items no longer needed, invoicing and billing for services, and the ability to forecast consumption based on historical demand.
To learn more, you can go to our Literature Request section to download the Data Sheets for the newScale PortfolioCenter and newScale DemandCenter.
