How ITAM and FinOps help reclaim latent value from your IT investments

IT waste is an acute and perennial issue impacting organizations of all sizes. Flat or shrinking IT budgets are flanked by increased costs. CFOs and CIOs are forced to do more with less while organizations must balance investments, risk, and opportunity. Gartner^®1 predicts “Global IT spending will grow to $5.7 trillion in 2025.” This is an increase of 8.2% year-over-year.

Organizations need new ways to deliver value to business stakeholders. Many are looking inward, searching for opportunities to optimize their IT spending so they can reinvest in innovation and growth.

IT spend optimization is a continuous journey – a multi-team effort that requires breaking down silos and looking holistically and honestly at your environment. Doing so can unlock lasting gains compared to periodic, topic-focused initiatives, but the path forward isn’t so simple.

What issues and hurdles do organizations face when trying to increase IT value? How can collaboration boost efficiencies and reduce waste, thereby enabling investments that support business growth?

In part one of this two-part blog series, we’ll explore the challenges of IT spend optimization and how you can begin increasing value from your investments.

Why is IT spend optimization so challenging?

IT spend optimization is particularly difficult because it spans so many functions, including finance, IT operations, vendor management, architecture, cloud engineering, business stakeholders, and more. Each group has its own priorities. Engineers focus on development, finance on renewals, operations on service and system maintenance, and so on.

As your organization grows and technology options multiply, having clear sponsorship, joint buy-in, and a shared value management framework become major hurdles.

Meanwhile, many organizations struggle to overcome siloed decision making, governance gaps, and reactionary behaviors. IT asset management (ITAM) and FinOps teams can help address these obstacles, though organizations rarely position, fund, or empower them to tackle the many elements of value management.

It’s time to bring ITAM and FinOps together

ITAM and FinOps have traditionally lived in separate spheres – ITAM focusing on compliance and risk management, chasing after events, while FinOps works to maximize value in the cloud. When they work together, and when supported by IT and finance leadership and enabled by trustworthy data, their combined skillsets can dramatically reduce waste.

Some organizations are catching on. Flexera’s 2025 State of ITAM Report finds collaboration between FinOps and ITAM teams has grown from last year, from 29% to 43% of respondents, while optimizing and finding savings in software spend will be the top-ranked software asset management (SAM) initiative of 2026.

Listen now: Shane Cronin, Head of ITAM Services at SHI^®, joins the Research Breakdown podcast to unpack the findings of Flexera’s 2025 State of ITAM Report.

FinOps and ITAM are core to achieving other objectives such as sustainability, accurate forecasting, and budgeting, as well as demonstrating financial ROI. To realize sustainable value, shift your culture and operations to make optimization a core accountability across stakeholders. Ensure this shift is supported by leadership, incentives, and daily practices.

How to mobilize your teams toward IT spend optimization

We recommend you start by evolving your organization’s mindset. Position ITAM and FinOps together as your “technology value” group – your enablers of innovation and control. Their objective will be to optimize costs and deliver governance for clear, efficient processes and informed decision making.

A cross-functional steering group should sponsor and guide technology value contributors, drawing voices across the following groups:

Help stakeholders understand their role in the process

Ensure every stakeholder understands their role and the “what’s in it for me” benefits of effective value management. You can do this by mapping interdependencies and touchpoints across the technology lifecycle. Include inputs like skills, data sources, knowledge, and toolsets as well as requirements such as reporting, incentives, processes, and outcomes.

Make full use of your personas

Identify what each persona group can contribute and how they stand to benefit from effective value management. Leverage their wide range of capabilities and facilitate an accountability culture that doesn’t conflict with each team’s primary function.

Gain organization-wide support

It’s important to empower your technology value group to engage stakeholders and garner support. Your steering group can aid them by widely communicating the group’s mission statement and objectives, building the momentum needed to overcome obstacles and resistance. Set minimum expectations and success criteria alongside areas of prioritization. Review these two-to-four times per year and adjust as you progress.

Reclaim and reinvest wasted IT spend with Spend Optimization Services

Fostering this collaboration between ITAM and FinOps is just the beginning of your IT spend optimization journey. As work begins, you’ll realize optimization touches every stage of the IT lifecycle – from selection and configuration to deployment, management, renewal and retirement. Each step is an opportunity to contain costs, streamline operations, and achieve measurable business outcomes.

That’s why we at SHI have aligned our ITAM, FinOps, Licensing Advisory, Long-tail Spend, and Procurement service capabilities into a single, dependable practice: Spend Optimization Services (SOS).  We’ve designed SOS to help you break down internal silos and address the roadblocks to IT value realization.

With SOS, our IT spend optimization experts will work with you and your stakeholders to identify and eliminate waste, foster support across your business units, create governance for continual optimization over the long term, and more.

NEXT STEPS

Reclaiming IT spend is an ongoing journey, but you don’t have to do it alone. Contact our experts today to see how SOS by SHI can help.

¹Gartner, Technology Market Essentials Primer for 2025, Niketa Patel, 29 January 2025

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