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Best Practices In IT Financial Management
The Foundation For Running IT Like A Business
November 6, 2009 , 17 pages
by Craig Symons
In a recent Forrester survey of 84 enterprise IT decision-makers, only 52% said that they have a formal IT chargeback process in place. It is difficult to run IT like a business when the product appears to be free to customers but costs the business hundreds of millions of dollars to operate — which is precisely what happens when IT costs are not charged back to its customers. Instead, CIOs should embrace full cost transparency, which requires IT to operate like a service provider with a catalog of products and services aligned with its customers' needs, defined cost models for each service, an understanding of the demand drivers, and a process to track and invoice its customers based on their consumption of those services. Forrester has identified a number of best practices that leading organizations have used to make this transition to full cost transparency.

Role Overview: Service Catalog Manager
November 6, 2009 , 4 pages
by Evelyn Hubbert
Most IT organizations "get" the service management concept and many have implemented and improved their processes, and the interrelationships of these processes, to support and service the business. Many companies have implemented elements of ITIL as a best practice to assist with the "how-to" of a particular — or multiple — processes. A central topic for IT and the business is the management of these services as standard offerings with clear definitions, service-level agreements (SLAs), costs, and associated reports on the quality of the delivery of these services. This is where a service catalog helps. It is simply a repository of standard services that are available to business users from internal or external providers of IT services. The end-to-end management of this service catalog lies in the hands of a service catalog manager.

Forrester's Best Practices Framework For BT Leadership Maturity
Use Our Self-Assessment To Accelerate Your BT Transformation
November 6, 2009 , 17 pages
by Bobby Cameron, Tim DeGennaro
As CIOs help their firms succeed with business technology (BT) — pervasive technology use with increased direct control by the business — they struggle to answer two deceptively simple questions: 1) How are we doing? and 2) what should we do better? These questions invite a host of complexities, raising questions about what the best organizations are doing, when to be complacent, when to push the envelope, and what to focus on first. Forrester has developed a best practices framework — informed by countless interactions with BT trailblazers — for cutting through this complexity. This framework is based on more than 130 BT leadership best-practice capabilities, arranged into five element groupings: culture, performance measurement, process, strategy, and structure. The framework enables CIOs to conduct a self-assessment to understand how their organization measures up against the best and to identify the areas offering the greatest opportunity for improvement.

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