Robert's approach to the question on IT Financial Management

My approach: Note the stage of maturity that is postulated for this question. The Unified Oil case study is broad enough that questions can be pUnified Oilhed at initiation, When answering this question it is important to focus on the full deployment. Whether or not Unified Oil actually achieved that is not relevant. You do not have enough information in the case study to the question to know where Unified Oil actually is. Thus, this is actually a theoretical ITIL question, with a case study wrapper.

Be sure that you format your response and address your response as if you are responding to the CFO. While defining each term is always essential, I positioned this question to help you understand the importance of that practice. You know that you cannot assume that the CFO actually understands ITIL in spite of his alleged competence. And yet, you cannot insult someone with as much influence over your consulting income by assuming he does not know what he is talking about. Keep this approach in mind with all of your questions. You, as the consultant, have some expertise that your customer lacks. But, your customer might well have depths of expertise that rival your own and is almost always assured to know more about his or her job than you do.

Robert's outline

• Pick some of the benefits specific to Financial Management and only go to generic benefits if you cannot come up with 4 points. Remember, this is only four points, so one good explanation on one benefit is all that really matters. I might just go with this outline and just add a couple quick definitions of some terms.
  • Quick bullets
    • Single point of contact
    • Better planning through budgeting
    • Better able to prioritize by knowing the costs for services
  • Key benefit is improved alignment between IT and the business.
    • Charging lets the business understand IT costs.
    • Feedback on those charges helps IT understand the business need.
• This is the hardest part of the question because it is one topic and it counts for 8 points. I would like to try for four points each on budgeting and charging and a couple safety points by rounding out my explanation of charging without duplicating what I already used in part 1.
  • Budgeting
  • Costing
  • Charging
• Pick two. The ones that are the easiest for me to connect to are SLM and Capacity.
  • Service Level Management
    • Definition
    • How connected - SLM actually negotiates pricing and manages invoices
    • What are artifacts would I expect to find if this is working
      • SLA
      • Invoice process and pricing defined in the SLA
      • Credit / rebates defined in the SLA
  • Capacity
    • Definition
    • Responsible for assessing new technologies
    • Work closely with Financial to do cost / benefit evaluations on new technologies
    • Also need Financial to assist with purchases