FITS - Financial Management

Service Level Management links closely to Financial Management.  There may be a difference between desirable and affordable service levels and it is the Service Level Management process that enables a balance to be struck between what the users would like and what is possible with the funds available.

Financial Management is an input to the Service Level Management process as it provides budget and cost information to work with when negotiating service level agreements.

Financial Management interfaces with Configuration Management  by way of the asset data in the configuration management database.  This data can provide useful information about what equipment has been purchased during the financial period and may help to gather actual costs.  The CMDB should also give an indication of when equipment is due to be replaced and should therefore contribute to the budgeting part of financial management.

You will see that there is an overlap of data collected for Configuration Management and Financial Management, such as allocation of equipment and date of purchase.  In the early stages of best-practice implementation it is acceptable to have some duplication such as this: it is only a small amount and duplication is easier than trying to combine the two processes at this stage.  Ultimately you can keep the financial management data in the configuration-management database and eliminate the duplication, but you need not be concerned with that at this stage.