I remember the days when I worked in a medium size IT Operations group supporting the Finance Group.  Every year, I participated in a painful exercise of building the overall operating budget for my group and specifically building the IT budget for the Corporate Finance Group.  The reason this was painful is that I needed to justify why hardware and software was needed and do it in a way that the Director of Finance could understand and accept.  If I only knew then, what I know now, this process wouldn't have been so difficult.

The Finance Group had a substantial investment in IT systems and services to help manage and process their data and they perceived these systems as tools to help them achieve their daily and monthly goals.  The Finance Group also perceived me as a person who provided IT Services ranging from PC Support to Software Development to keeper of their IT budget. Whenever members of the Finance team and I had discussions regarding new reports of system enhancements, we learned not to discuss them in technical terms, but rather in process terms beneficial to achieving a prescribed goal.  When we discussed delivery dates of reports or other services it was in terms that were relevant to their business objectives.

So the question that I ask myself now is why then didn't I use a similar tact to during the budgeting process?  The answer that I came up with is that I didn't have effective service management and service level management processes in place.  I didn't work with the Finance Group to describe or characterize the financial systems as services or service offerings that we would be mutually agreeable. In addition, we had not defined meaningful metrics/KPIs to describe how well the services were being delivered.  Had I done these two things, the budget process probably wouldn't have been so painful.  The major reason for this is that when I made a request for additional hardware, software or human resources, the request estimates would have been more exact and accurate, because the estimates would have been based upon empirical data.  When answering questions posed by the Director of Finance, a self professed technophobe, my responses would have been based upon the mutually agreed upon service offering, the details associated with it, and how they relate to the business goals of the Finance Group and ultimately the company overall.