Shaun Daly published a great article titled “Why Financial Transparency Matters”, in which he describes the challenges that traditional service provides are faced with in order to expand margins while winning new clients. The clients, seeking to avoid large up-front costs, are willing to take on a longer-term relationship, as long as they can show rapid value to their business and can trust the provider.
Financial transparency is the cornerstone of a trusted client/partner relationship. A vendor is not going to get far using the term “trust me” in a dialog with a procurement professional. Transparency benefits both parties. The provider needs to monitor their operating margins, while the customer needs to ensure they are not being over billed.
Shaun points out that when two organizations decide to work together within a complex service relationship, the relationship must be seen as the substance of the deal that transcends the solution and the terms and conditions. As such, finding a partner that values mutuality and transparency is paramount.
Any Managed Service Provider (MSP) is familiar with the challenge of ensuring accurate billing for the duration of a client engagement. It’s challenging because IT environments are always in a state of flux, with new services being introduced and existing services expanding or being retired. These changes directly impact the number of IT assets under management, which is the basis for MSP billing. It is important to remember that getting billing right is in the interest of both the supplier and the customer.
Having a common understanding of the externally managed environment is critical to providing an authoritative basis for billing. A verified Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is usually this reference source. For the CMDB to be authoritative Data Quality Management has to be the core enabler for every asset record and associated attribute; every Configuration Item has to be verified for accuracy against multiple sources, using the most up-to-date available data.
Blazent provides services that ensure the quality of every record in an enterprise CMDB. Information Services Group (ISG), a leading services company uses Blazent as part of its Consumption Management services which verify usage and billing accuracy, in addition to providing transparency for clients and their service providers. ISG and Blazent produced a white paper that clearly demonstrates the value of transparency and trust to both client and partner. The white paper includes a case study on how a major hotel chain was able to correct an inaccurate asset baseline, saving more than $2.2 million for their outsourcing RFP. The white paper titled “How MSP’s can deliver new services, generate revenue and improve client trust” can be downloaded here. For additional information on how Data Quality Management can help drive transparency in your organization, please click here.