The Road to Stronger IT Governance: Paved with Effective IT Financial Management

The processes used to manage IT budgets and assign IT costs to the business are a strategic, central part of IT governance. But without business-management involvement in IT governance, IT cannot make the investment and prioritization decisions that have the greatest return to the enterprise as a whole.

In addition, recent research by Cutter Consortium has shown that there is little commonality in the IT financial management processes organizations use. In the absence of best practices, companies seriously compromise their ability to effectively govern IT, particularly from the perspective of the business unit.

In this half-day workshop, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Bob Benson will provide you with - and teach you how to use - a framework for IT financial management and budgeting that will not only improve the financial impact of IT in your organization, but will also enable you to gain the support of your CFO and strengthen your relationships with business unit management. This workshop is not a discussion of "chargeback" - it is a discussion of how IT budgets and costs are central to effective governance. You will discover the impact of your organization's choice of budget structure; categories of costs that should be included in your IT budgets; business support costs for IT, such as HR and accounting; payment options for business units; and how these relate to your enterprise's basis for evaluating and valuing IT investment.

Bob Benson will take you through a three-step IT budgeting/governance process that will help you:

• Fairly communicate complete IT costs to business units
• Directly engage business units in decisions about IT costs that affect them
• Improve bottom-line impact by providing the cost transparency that encourages better business decision making

The advice and training you'll get in this workshop is derived from Bob Benson's years of experience helping organizations assess and evaluate their budgeting and governance practices, plan and implement new processes, develop effective IT steering committees, and minimize the conflict and disruption such change brings about.

Many factors, from culture to industry norms, enter into the enterprise decision about IT budget structure and related practices. But regardless of the form these "from the top" budget edicts take, it's imperative that IT does not lose sight of the fact that budgets and IT costs play a critical role in IT governance. Discover techniques you can use to distribute IT costs to the business units, and reap the benefits that engaged business unit managers bring to the IT governance process.

Bob ties his experience and real-world stories back to the story told by the data collected in Cutter's recent survey examining general and specific aspects of IT budgeting in 98 organizations worldwide this year, and another 76 firms studied last year. The data demonstrate that, in the absence of common budgeting practices, enterprises are struggling to understand the true financial impact of IT. Attend this workshop and leave with a framework your enterprise can use to ensure it does understand the impact of its IT decisions and with a process for ensuring IT governance includes, and is actively supported by, the business units that benefit from IT investment decisions.

Workshop Outline:

1. The Critical Relationship of Budget and Costs to IT Governance
   • Determining the current IT budgeting practices
   • The basis for IT budget governance
   • The IT organization budget structure
   • Costs included in the IT budget
   • Presentation of IT costs to business units
   • Business unit involvement in IT budgets
2. Altering Practices for Better Governance
3. A Multi-Phased Approach to IT Budgeting and Governance
   • Identifying best practices for your enterprise
   • How many budget cycles should it take?
   • The role of the IT steering committee