Case Study: CHRISTUS Health achieves IT cost transparency and avoids headcount cuts with Apptio Cost Transparency

Better Planning Leads to Better Outcomes at CHRISTUS Health

CHRISTUS Health, a $5B international faith-based not-for-profit health system with 60+ hospitals and 30,000 employees, faced mounting IT cost and governance challenges as it centralized operations and pursued aggressive growth. The IT organization lacked visibility into the total cost of ownership across 1,200 applications, confronted a $60M increase in application spend, and relied on siloed spreadsheets and 5–6 month budget cycles—putting roles at risk and making executive budget conversations contentious.

To address this, CHRISTUS stood up a TBM office and implemented Apptio Cost Transparency, IT Planning, and Benchmarking to model TCO, map spend across nine service categories, and consolidate budgeting. The result was monthly, per‑application visibility tied to demand, streamlined rolling forecasts and manager collaboration, avoided headcount reductions, and a dramatically faster, low‑friction budget approval process (including a 30‑minute board review).

CHRISTUS Health

George Conklin

SVP and CIO