Financial Management quantifies, in financial terms, the value of IT services for the business and IT department. This includes measuring the value of the underpinning infrastructure that provides the services and qualifying operational forecasts. Applying a services approach to IT, financial management helps identify, document and agree on the value of services being provisioned by IT, and provides service demand modeling and management.
With a goal to ensure funding for the delivery and consumption of services, Financial Management focuses on the demand and supply requirements based on business strategy, capacity inputs and forecasting use. As a transitional role between an organization's corporate finances and service management, Financial Management calculates and assigns a monetary value to a Service and service components to allow costs to be spread across the organization.
The monetary value is derived by calculating the operating and capital costs, which include the investments made in hardware and software license costs, annual maintenance fees for hardware and software and personnel resources used to support and maintain the services, across the number of Users.
Tightly integrated throughout the application, Financial Management derives hierarchical costs from within the CMDB and considers Org Units as Cost Centers, while extending functionality built into the Service Item costs calculator. Used as a forecasting tool, it provides the service organization with information about pricing a service, by detailing the contributing cost factors and applying concepts such as cost splitting across services that leverage common infrastructure. Stored in the CMDB, the central repository, organizations can generate their own reports and all data is broken down by cost center, ready to be reassembled in real time for the User interface to assist with business planning and the budgeting processes.
Financial Management is not a standalone process in this service management application, but a component of Service Portfolio Management and the Service Catalog, with direct access being found within the Service Item Costs tab of any Service Category Item.
To access this functionality, Users must be assigned the Finance Role, in the Information tab of their User information screen. For detailed information about using Financial Management, refer to Financial Management Applied.