Case Study: Royal Dutch Shell achieves a 20% reduction in application run costs with Apptio

How Shell IT Manages Data to Bend the Cost Curve

Royal Dutch Shell, a global energy company with thousands of applications and a rising IT run-cost base, faced pressure to “bend the cost curve” as budgets flattened. The IT organization was managing more than 5,000 applications across fragmented, outsourced systems and multiple general ledgers, leaving no clear, application-level view of costs and poor data quality for decision making.

Shell’s IT4IT team adopted a Technology Business Management (TBM) approach to create an application-centric cost model fed by CMDB mappings, PPM links and new trusted data sources, and made application owners accountable for ongoing data quality via dashboards and governance. Integrated into annual portfolio reviews and used by ~1,100 users, the program enabled targeted levers (rationalization, service tiers, staffing, virtualization, SaaS) and delivered a 20% reduction in application run costs within 12 months while creating a sustainable, data-driven culture for continuous optimization.

Shell

Peter McKay

IT Business Management Lead