Financial Management
One goal of Financial Management is to ensure proper funding for the delivery and consumption of services. Planning provides financial translation and qualification of expected future demand for IT Services. Financial Management Planning departs from historical IT planning by focusing on demand and supply variances resulting from business strategy, capacity inputs and forecasting, rather than traditional individual line item expenditures or business cost accounts. As with planning for any other business organization, input should be collected from all areas of the IT organization and the business.
Planning can be categorized into three main areas, each representing financial results that are required for continued visibility and service valuation:
- Operating and Capital (general and fixed asset ledgers)
- Demand (need and use of IT services - discussed earlier in this chapter)
- Regulatory and Environmental (compliance).
Operating and Capital planning processes are common and fairly standardized, and involve the translation of IT expenditures into corporate financial systems as part of the corporate planning cycle. Beyond this, the importance of this process is in communicating expected changes in the funding of IT Services for consideration by other business domains. The impact of IT Services on capital planning is largely underestimated, but is of interest to tax and fixed asset departments if the status of an IT asset changes.
Regulatory and Environmental-related planning should get its triggers from within the business. However, FM should apply the proper financial inputs to the related services value, whether cost based or value based.
Confidence is the notion that financial inputs and models for service demand and supply represent statistically significant measures of accuracy. Data confidence is important for two reasons: 1) the critical role data plays in achieving the objectives of Financial Management, and 2) the possibility of erroneous data undermining decision making.
Since Financial Management performs unique financial translation and qualification functions, there is an obligation to ensure that the confidence level of planning data and information is high. Questions about its accuracy will undermine its perceived value. It is therefore important to follow good security practices for access and rights management so that information quality is not compromised. Planning confidence is ultimately a combination of serviceoriented demand modelling translated into measurable financial requirements with a high degree of statistical accuracy. The financial requirements act as inputs to critical business decision making.
More on Financial Management
Read more on Financial Management here:
Accounting »
Costs »
Implementation checklist »
Return On Investment »
Value and benefits »
Variable Costs Dynamic »
Other ITIL Processes
In order to have a good understanding of ITIL and the importance of configuration management, we first define what ITIL is: ITIL is literally a collection of documentation.
This documentation can help IT organizations implement the best practices. The documentation grows and grows as more successful techniques are documented and guidelines established for what can make others successful. The latest ITIL resources are published by the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC).
Integrated service delivery refers to the need for Configuration Management, Change Management, Incident Management, Problem Management and Release Management processes that are linked together in a meaningful manner. For example, the process of releasing components to the live environment (the domain of Release Management) is also an issue for Configuration Management and Change Management whilst the Service Desk is primarily responsible for liaison between IT providers and the Users of services. This section highlights the links and the principal relationships between all the Service Management and other infrastructure management processes.
ITIL processes fall under Operational Layer or Tactical Layer, as follows:
| Operational Layer: | Configuration Management - Service Desk Management - Incident & Problem Management - Change Management - Release Management |
| Tactical Layer: | Service Level Management - Availability Management - Capacity Management - Continuity Management - Financial Management |