The average IT budget as a percentage of revenue ranges from 5 to 8 percent, according to CIO Magazine's 2009 State of the CIO Survey. The survey also found that one of the critical success factors in IT expenditures is appropriately aligning IT with business goals and ensuring a positive ROI on IT investments

For many IT and finance departments, determining ROI is a time consuming and manual process. IT and finance often have a good understanding of project costs from their project management systems, but need more insight into ongoing operations costs and the relationship between those costs and business services. Forrester estimates that these MOOSE values (maintenance, ongoing operations, systems, and equipment) represent 60 to 80 percent of an Enterprise IT budget. Understanding these expenditures and how they relate to specific business units and applications can provide true cost transparency to IT.

Advanced Analytics for IT Business Decision Making

With these capabilities, IT and finance executives can:

• Determine the right IT investments for their business needs.
• Optimize the ROI of existing IT investments with scenario planning to compare the cost-benefit trade-offs of different options.
• Analyze and implement cost-effective private clouds, including the implementation of utility-based accounting.
• Prepare the data center for outsourcing, providing a vendor neutral perspective on the most cost-effective outsourcing opportunities.
• Implement sustainability goals into the IT ROI calculating, including metrics that help IT and finance set measure CO₂ reduction and energy cost goals for the data center.