The IT financial analyst should be conversant in technology and financial disciplines and report on the availability, reliability and cost of business transactions.
The IT financial analyst performs dual roles in organizations. Not only are you expected to be conversant in technology and financial disciplines, you have to ensure that IT decisions are financially sound. Day-to-day decisions may center on purchase vs. lease analysis, depreciation schedules, rate setting for cost allocation, and financial analysis during project portfolio management.
Perhaps the most contentious is the rate setting activity. Traditionally, IT has reported on resource consumption by technical process while clients have expected or demanded resource consumption data by business process.
The challenge for the IT financial analyst is to gather cost information on IT solutions and bridge the gap to accurately communicate business transaction cost information to clients. A discussion between the IT financial analyst and IT personnel may involve consumption metrics like CPU seconds, real memory utilization, track days, or bandwidth consumption. However, when working with clients, the discussion may center around the cost to complete a payment, enter a new order, record a new customer, bill a customer, or provide customer support by phone.
The solution rests in being able to monitor and record transaction-level data to drive cost allocation. Clients do not find traditional information on CPU consumption, bandwidth consumption, or real memory consumption to be valuable in the process of making the necessary financial decisions for business processes. Instead, the IT financial analyst, working with IT personnel, must be able to report on the availability, reliability and cost for complete business transactions.
IT can enhance its monitoring and reporting strategies by using SharePath. Resource consumption data for an end-to-end business transaction can be captured and be architected into the technical infrastructure. The benefit of having a transaction management view into availability, reliability and cost dimensions not only strengthen IT’s relationship with the client community, it provides a common ground for managing the many variables.
