Case Study: Kaiser Permanente manages IT demand and avoids multi‑million storage costs with Apptio

How Kaiser IT Uses Data To Manage Demand with the Business

Kaiser Permanente, a $56B not‑for‑profit health system serving over 10 million members, faced runaway IT demand—about 25,000 servers, 175,000 workstations and nearly 69 PB of storage—while business units received opaque chargebacks allocated by headcount and saw IT costs as an unavoidable “tax.” Their in‑house costing system couldn’t scale or respond quickly to new technologies, and dirty, incomplete data made it impossible to show business leaders how to influence IT spend.

Kaiser adopted the TBM Council taxonomy and a web‑based TBM system, mapping financial and IT data, cleaning sources, training stakeholders and creating role‑based accountability. The result: clear service‑level cost transparency, easier benchmarking, and actions such as thin provisioning that avoided multi‑million‑dollar storage purchases; a shift to private cloud (57% of requests) and application rationalization; and better demand management, predictable pricing plans and freed capital for innovation.

Kaiser Permanente

Steve Adams

Executive Director, IT