Understanding how the IT budget process fit into the overall corporate finance is essential to grasp the big picture.  The following figure illustrates how the IT G&A operating budget fits into the over all corporate finance.

IT organization must decide the technique suitable for the budget cycle. To select the best suited techniques the organization must make them self familiar with the available options. Let me list the various widely used technique available to create the IT G&A operating budget.

• Static Budget – Presents one forecast for a given time frame and does not change for budget cycle
• Flexible Budget – Budgeted Revenue and cost are adjusted during the budget cycle
• Incremental budget – Previous year actual are taken as the base line and added or deleted additional cost for current year
• Zero Based budget – Begins from ground up
• Top Down budget – Each directors are given a budget task to align to CIO budget target
• Participatory Budget – Developed as a collaboration with all directors (generally very difficult to make it practical)

There are other budgeting technique like activity based budgeting, Kaizen budgeting and etc. Kaizen  is a type of incremental budget with cost effectiveness target are given to each directors. To make the framework complete, I understand the widely used budgeting technique must be captured and it will eventually.

For this version 0.1, I want to start with zero based budget since I like the concept. It is very practical and gives an opportunity to each director or even senior manager or manager level to challenge every activities and look for some level of business case. Zero based technique can be used if it is top down budget and budget task are given by CIO to each director. Let me start with ZBB.

Zero based budgeting must be done in the manager or team leader level and rolled up to director and CIO level.  It requires the manager or team lead to understand the business and forecast the work required to keep the systems lights on, enhancements and G&A project.

The cost for lights on, enhancement and projects are will be incurred by employee, contractor, purchase servie, software cost & hardware cost. Each manager or team lead under each director will forcast for lights on, enhancement and project in terms of employee, contractor, purchase service, software cost and hardware cost.

The training required to perform the forecast will be the starting session of next part of this initial IT Financial Framework.