CIO生存指南,CIO应该利用的财务资源.pdf

5

Financial Resources












—Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?“
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Introduction

One of the least understood aspects of managing an IT department is financial
management. Financial management is the sound stewardship of the ary resources of
anization. It supports anization in planning and executing its business strategy
and requires a consistent application throughout anization to achieve maximum
efficiency and minimum conflict. Therefore, understanding the economics of the
organization in general and Information Technology is a major step toward developing
sound financial strategies to modate technological advancement.


Fig. – Position of Financial Resources in the IT stack

Within IT, financial management is visible in three main functions: budgeting, costing and
charging.

Budgeting is the process of predicting and controlling the spending of money. It consists of
a periodic negotiation cycle to set budgets (usually annual) and the day-to-day monitoring
of the current budgets.

Costing is the set of processes that enable the anization to fully account for the way
its money is spent.
Charging is the set of processes required to bill the customers for the services supplied to
them.

Budgeting, costing and charging are interrelated and interdependent.

Fig. – Financial processes


A budget is the overview of all the projected expenses and the way they will be paid for.
anization's budget is the financial expression of its strategy and so is the part of the
budget that covers the IT expenses and es. The IT budget also takes into account
other elements such as risks, the architecture of the IT environment and the life cycle of the
IT systems.

Following a well-defined costing model a detailed follow-up of the actual spending is then
made, particularly to identify costs by cus