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By Scott Davis

Tracking communication spend across the organization can be a challenge – especially with more companies moving to cloud solutions. Separate silos of information, lack of accountability, poor reporting processes – they all contribute to IT management headaches. And when you layer on the complexities of tracking a myriad of cloud solutions, it can get messy.

We’ve worked with many companies that are turning to shared services management because it gives them a centralized approach to managing business resources, exposes which costs centers or departments are creating spend based on actual usage, and it ultimately helps reduce costs across the organization. If you identify with any of the problems below, you may be a candidate for shared services management.

Problem #1: You have little or no visibility into communications spend.

Do you find yourself making broad assumptions about communications spend allocation? Or do you know the actual numbers but cannot attribute the costs properly to understand where the budget is spent? When multiple services and solutions contribute to the overall cloud and telecommunication bill (and if you’re like many companies), you simply pay the invoice without investigating the accuracy and pricing. Sound familiar?

Problem #2: Your organization is spending significant time and resources tracking expenses and researching their cause.

When multiple departments are responsible for telecom usage, the information you need may reside in departmental silos. While IT may handle the procurement and deployment process, if you don’t have access to accurate detail and insights, there is no accountability. It gets complex when multiple departments use the same communication solutions, but costs are not fairly spread across the users. How will you allocate or assign those costs? When managing billing and reporting processes, you need assurance that expense data is easy to identify and not slipping through the cracks.

Problem #3:  Your internal customers want to understand why they are getting charged, but the process to show them is manual at best and impossible at worst.

With all the cloud and communications services an IT department supports, it’s extremely difficult to do any sort of show back, let alone accurate charge back. In this scenario, what your internal customers (in the form of cost centers, departments or even individuals) are looking for is how much they actually spent based on accurate usage calculations – not a general peanut butter allocation.

Problem #4 (and the biggest): You don’t have a big picture view to clearly understand the true cost of your technology.

We all agree that information is power and when you have it all at your fingertips you can make better decisions. Shared services management gives you centralized control and oversight over your entire communications spend. You have the visibility you need to effectively allocate costs based on usage in any way you need. Then imagine the impact and improvement to your strategic decisions if you could take that newly found visibility and apply advanced analytics against all the data. That is true strategic business power that helps you reduce communications costs across the organization.

If you’d like to learn more about the benefits of shared services management and how you can benefit, click here.

Also, check out this blog:  7 Ways Shared Services Management Can Reduce Your Organization’s Costs