As chief financial officers scrutinize every item in the budget this year, IT organizations are finding it tougher to sell IT investments to financial executives, even when IT managers are pretty sure the spending will ultimately save the company money.

With that in mind, Hewlett-Packard is introducing a new technology in its IT Financial Management business intelligence portfolio of products. The HP Project and Portfolio Management Center 8.0 is designed to help IT executives demonstrate the cost benefits of IT spending to the people in charge of the money—the CFOs.

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While IT has been helping the rest of the business to leverage enterprise applications and associated BI to make better business decisions, IT itself has been left much like the "cobbler's children without shoes," says Ken Cheney, director of product marketing at HP Software and Solutions. That is, IT often operates its own BI in the form of a series of Excel spreadsheets and a lot of gut decisions.

"A lot of time and effort is spent using silos of information and doing spreadsheet kung fu," Cheney says. 

In a survey conducted by HP of 200 IT executives in the last month, 70 percent say that business leaders' demands of IT continue to outpace IT budgets. But when those IT leaders are looking to intelligently invest in IT infrastructure, nearly half say they feel they lack investment rigor and have no form of portfolio management in place for aligning IT investment decisions with business priorities.

Project and Portfolio Management Center 8.0 leverages HP's configuration management system to discover and map IT infrastructure to the services that IT delivers, says Cheney, including the physical, logical and virtual environments. It captures the time and cost associated with the work that people are doing, and HP Asset Manager leverages all the non-labor costs. The tool consolidates all budget and cost information in one place, and then performs the analysis and reporting in one place. Cheney says the tool gathers information from both HP and non-HP infrastructures.

HP offers a services component as part of the financial planning and analysis tool to help organizations map third-party data. HP says it can provide a soup-to-nuts services engagement.

HP is selling the tool and services directly and through its channel partners. Accenture is one of the major systems integrator partners.