How to Communicate Your IT Budget, Part II
Building the Budget The precise mechanics you use to develop the budget is beyond the scope of this article, but I will address some key practices I think are worth incorporating in your approach. Clearly Define Ownership Begin with a core issue: how does the organization handle IT expenses? Are IT expenses centralized within one budget or decentralized? Seldom is this a black-and-white answer, but a detailed understanding is critical. Consider for example service subscriptions. Imagine your finance organization uses a service to help with state income tax rates or expense reporting. Do they budget for that service? Does that service index for headcount, does it include support, and how are IT costs impacted by that service? Almost every area of the organization can have embedded IT expenditures, often without the budget owner's recognition. Even IT can suffer the same issue, consider all the small "tools" developers and system administrators l