【正文】 ist the business unit in the preparation of accurate and realistic bids and proposals. ? Accurate cost data is necessary to optimize operations. Service Management Function 7 Planning The development of a sound budget encourages and promotes better IT planning. Customers are encouraged to be costconscious about the services they use and to educate individual users about the costs associated with their activities. Planning focuses attention on the anization’s goals and objectives. It results in better decisions and helps the anization evaluate risk and take reasonable risks. Planning assists anizations in the MOF Optimizing Quadrant. Optimization Budgets and accurate cost information provide metrics that can be used to measure performance, reliability, and customer satisfaction. For example, a report that measures actual costs against budgeted costs is a useful metric for assessing performance. Another example is accessing changes to ensure that they were implemented within their budget. Comparing performance versus anization plans is one of the first steps in optimizing performance. The Optimizing Quadrant uses the information collected through the costaccounting activity. The Optimizing Quadrant includes processes, procedures, and techniques to manage and reduce costs while maintaining or improving service levels. In order to plete the optimizing activity, IT financial information must be collected and provided to the manager(s) responsible for IT optimization. The collection of this information and the production of appropriate reports take place within the costaccounting activity. Cost Recovery Properly implemented cost accounts facilitate improved cost recovery. Cost accounts must be logical and easy to understand. Many corporations today are utilizing cost allocation or chargeback models where business units are funding their own key IT projects. This places more accountability for the business value of IT projects in the hands of those who must justify the expenditure and prove the benefits. Implementing cost recovery puts more pressure on the IT groups to accurately collect costs and to bee more efficient and costeffective. Goals and Objectives The goals and objectives of financial management are to be able to fully account for the cost of IT services, to attribute the costs to the services delivered to the anization’s customers so that the costs can be recovered, to aid decision making by understanding the cost of IT services, and to provide business cases for changes to IT services based on a sound understanding of the costs involved. 8 Financial Management Scope The Financial Management SMF enables the anization to account for the cost of delivering IT services, as well as to: ? Identify assets and activities to which costs are assigned and develop cost allocation schemes to enable the cost elements to be fairly distributed to customers for services they have received. ? Develop budgets, based on planned future activities, and assess the budgetary performance of current activities. The financial manager gathers information from each anizational department that uses IT services and each SMF within the anization. ? Analyze the cost and benefits of proposed changes and new services. Financial management uses several methods of analyzing the financial impact of a proposed request for change, including payback period, present value, return on investment, total cost of ownership, and real cost of ownership. ? Recover the cost of IT services from customers by developing chargeback methods and the billing of costs to customers. Key Definitions Capital costs. Capital costs are costs associated with the purchase or major enhancement of fixed assets—for example, puter equipment (building and plant)—and are often also referred to as ―oneoff‖ costs. Cost element. If more detail is required in calculating costs, the major cost categories of hardware, software, employment, acmodation, and transfer can be further subdivided into cost elements to provide more detail in calculating costs. For example, hardware might be divided into office, work, and central servers. The purpose of this is to ensure that every cost identified in the IT department can be placed within a table of costs by type, thereby enabling analysis to be performed by type—for example, all work costs. Cost unit. In the context of puter services business code (CSBC), the cost unit is a functional unit that establishes standard cost per workload element of activity, based on calculated activity ratios converted to cost ratios. Depreciation. The loss in value of an asset due to its use and/or the passage of time. The annual depreciation charge in accounts represents the amount of capital assets used up in the accounting period. It is charged in the cost accounts to ensure that the cost of capital equipment is reflected in the unit costs of the services provided using the equipment. There are various methods of calculating depreciation for the period: straightline, reducing balance, and by usage. Direct cost. A cost that is incurred for and that can be traced in full to a product, service, cost center, or department. This is an allocated cost. Direct costs are direct materials, direct wages, and direct expenses. Fixed cost. Fixed costs remain unchanged even as the level of resource usage varies. Fixed costs include any costs that are negotiated prior to the initiation of the service, such as maintenance contracts for hardware ponents. Indirect cost. A cost incurred in the course of making a product, providing a service, or running a cost center or department, but which cannot be traced directly and in full to the product, service, or department, because it has been incurred for a number of cost centers or cost units. These costs are apportioned to cost c