“Abraxio was a real opportunity to steer the CIO with ease, efficiency and security.”

• The CIO’s point of view :

As a CIO, you address many fundamental issues, but on a day-to-day basis, what are your struggles, your difficulties, your irritants?

Before implementing Abraxio, the most “costly” aspect of day-to-day CIO steering was undoubtedly the tools used, or rather the lack of tools, since most processes were Excel-based, with the exception of budget commitment tracking. The consequences are well known to all CIOs: a lack of consistency in processes, virtually unavoidable with a tool that was not designed for scoping and collaboration, and data reliability achieved at the cost of a great deal of effort and time spent re-entering information.

For us, this was true in all areas of piloting:

• Budgets were managed using Excel spreadsheets, from preparation to accounting reviews and closings, including tracking consumed and committed amounts.
• The same goes for our supplier databases, contracts and quotations, which were limited to documents stored in directories.
• Tracking our project portfolios was also done using Excel, with the “classic” link to Powerpoint and manually reconstituted supports, whether for bimonthly project reviews with General Management, or project arbitration committees.

The whole system was inefficient and complicated to manage. In the absence of a harmonized coding system, it was difficult, for example, to keep track of invoicing for Projects committed over several years.

Why Abraxio?

Abraxio was deployed opportunistically, initially in POC mode. After yet another tedious episode of budget preparation in Excel, we simply sought – in our quest for reliability and efficiency – to equip ourselves with a budget preparation and tracking solution that would limit the number of files, and de facto data re-entry.

Abraxio brought us other advantages: in particular, a form of framing, with good management and steering practices inspired by, or in line with, industry standards such as those of Cigref. This has enabled us to unify all our repositories (contracts, Vendor repositories, Resources, Projects) and to implement a truly collaborative approach to budget preparation and tracking. This step forward is perfectly in line with the way our CIO operates, since we centralize an IT budget with delegated tracking by domain and numerous rebilling keys.

The fact that Abraxio could be deployed in Saas mode without any integration, and with very little support, convinced us. The implementation went very smoothly at the end of 2020, with the integration of a first Budgets and the construction of our analytical axes in the platform.

So what do you do with the platform?

Since we implemented Abraxio, we have eliminated almost all the Excel files and file systems that were previously necessary for day-to-day IT department steering.

In concrete terms, as far as Budgets are concerned, almost all our processes are carried out through Abraxio – with the exception of our internal Chargebacks and the management of IT fees. We use the platform at every stage of the Budgets life cycle: preparation, tracking of committed and consumed amounts, management of orders, reforecasts and accounting closings. I’ve been able to delegate the tracking of sub-budgets to my domain managers, which encourages the empowerment and accountability of our Teams.

Our Projects portfolios are also managed through Abraxio, including the tracking of employee timesheets and fixed assets. In terms of management, we use Abraxio to conduct Projects reviews with senior management andarbitration processes.

Finally, all our documents – suppliers, commitments, contracts, invoices, etc. – are centralized in the platform. Abraxio serves as a frame of reference for standardizing our practices.

If you had to remember 3 benefits of Abraxio?

What I particularly appreciate about Abraxio is that the tool is truly dedicated to addressing the CIO’s businesses. Information is clearly aligned with a data model designed for the CIO, and closely aligned with our steering processes.

Another advantage is the platform’s strong collaborative dimension. This is first and foremost true within the CIO: whether you’re a manager, project leader or developer, you can be delegated precise scopes according to your profile, needs and responsibilities; but it’s also true between the CIO and its stakeholders, such as accounting or management control. In all cases, information is secure and reliable, whether in terms of restricted access rights to certain categories of data or to subsets of data (sub-budgets or Project portfolios, for example), or the ability to freeze different decisions and situations over time through versioning.

My final point is the ease of use and efficiency it generates on a daily basis. Generally speaking, the application’s ergonomics are modern and intuitive. But it doesn’t stop there: you can easily extract and export information in Excel, for example, or set up reports to improve CIO communication.

*This testimonial represents feedback gathered at a given moment, in the professional context of the interviewee at the time he/she held the position mentioned. His functions and scope may have changed since then.