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What is Financial
Management?
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FITS Financial Management is the tracking and control of the
cost of ICT services and support. In its entirety it also covers the
subject of cost recovery as a means to place accountability for
ICT costs on the users of the service. The purpose of financial
management is to ensure that the cost of ICT services and
support is justifiable and it also helps to identify particularly costly
areas that you may want to examine to see if taking a different
approach might reduce costs.
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Why use Financial
Management?
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Financial management helps you to record the cost of providing
ICT and ICT technical support. This helps you to:
- account for expenditure
- identify costs not budgeted for
- improve the budgeting process
- identify costs that were higher than expected
- identify areas for possible cost reduction
- identify the cause of costs
- implement methods of cost control.
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Who uses Financial
Management?
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Those responsible for ICT budgets use financial management.
They should also ensure that all staff involved in providing ICT
and technical support are conscious of the need for financial
management and that they adhere to the process at all times.
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Standardise
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Minimise the variety of different makes and models
to:
- make bulk purchases and possible discounts
more feasible
- reduce the need for cross-training in different
products
- enable a more efficient spares programme.
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- Go for
economies of
scale
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- Join forces with other schools to create a virtual
technical support team, buy in services together
or buy in bulk.
- Ask your LEA to co-ordinate services on behalf
of all schools in the area.
- Investigate the existence of specialist colleges
or other schools with 'specialist' status that may
be able to help you.
- Combine ICT with non-ICT services to provide a
single service centre instead of separate ones
for different services.
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- Improve incident
management
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- Document the solutions to incidents so that you
can resolve recurrences without involving
suppliers or having to pay repeat call-out
charges.
- Monitor incident volumes and identify trends
and causes to target improvements and reduce
support requirements.
See Incident Management for further information.
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Improve user skills
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To avoid costly call-out charges, raise user
awareness of simple technical issues such as
installing printer cartridges and checking computer
connections.
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