Develop a Fit-for-Purpose IT Financial Taxonomy

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Many IT departments struggle with their finances, namely making decisions about where their money should go, answering questions about where their money has gone, and demonstrating the relationship between IT cost and IT value.
Too often, these struggles are rooted in fundamental problems with the IT financial data itself.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

The causes of poor IT financial data are myriad but can be boiled down to three general issues: poor data reliability, poor data usability, and poor data availability.
Underlying this is the fact that IT and Finance often don’t understand one another, so they get stuck on basic communication problems and rarely progress to rectifying their shared financial data challenges.

Impact and Result

Take the first critical steps in rehabilitating and leveraging your IT financial data:

Know what IT financial data is, its points of origin, and where it lives organization.
Develop a meaningful taxonomy to classify and organize your IT financial data using Info-Tech’s IT Cost Model as a base.
Systematically implement your taxonomy in collaboration with your Finance department as part of your overall IT financial management program.

Develop a Fit-for-Purpose IT Financial Taxonomy Research & Tools

1. Develop a Fit-for-Purpose IT Financial Taxonomy Deck – A systematic guide for creating and implementing an IT financial data taxonomy to make it more organized, transparent, and usable.

This systematic guide will help you create and implement an IT financial data taxonomy to make it more organized, transparent, and usable. Take this critical first step in rehabilitating your IT financial data.

2. IT Financial Data Taxonomy Workbook – An Excel-based tool for documenting and organizing the outcomes of your IT financial data taxonomy development and implementation efforts.

This Excel workbook provides a place to document the outcomes of your IT financial data taxonomy development and implementation efforts, including data sources, use cases, data improvement activities, and the taxonomy itself.

Workshop: Develop a Fit-for-Purpose IT Financial Taxonomy

Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

Module 1: Set Your Objectives

The Purpose

Be introduced to foundational concepts about IT financial data and determine what you’d like to be able to do with it.

Key Benefits Achieved

Learn fundamentals about taxonomies and IT financial data.
Imagine what activities could be enabled by having reliable, usable, and accessible IT financial data.
Establish the first concrete goals in improving your IT financial data and practice of IT financial management overall.

Activities

Outputs

1.1

Understand the role of taxonomy in financial contexts.

1.2

Review what constitutes financial data.

1.3

Understand what good financial data looks like.

1.4

Brainstorm IT financial data use cases and requirements.

List of IT financial data use cases

1.5

Set taxonomy development initiative scope, goals, and success metrics.

Taxonomy development goals and objectives

Module 2: Discover Your IT Financial Data

The Purpose

Track down and record the vital statistics of your IT financial data and existing taxonomies.
Get a good sense of the effort that lies ahead of you based on your IT financial data’s current quality.

Key Benefits Achieved

Know where your IT financial data lives and how to get to it so that you don’t have to guess.
Discover the current quality of your IT financial data and identify related issues and challenges.
Confirm what existing taxonomies you can leverage to make your own taxonomy development more straightforward.

Activities

Outputs

2.1

Document the types, sources, and formats of IT financial data in your organization.

IT financial data and sources inventory

2.2

Assess overall quality of existing IT financial data and associated reliability, usability, and accessibility issues.

2.3

Identify and evaluate existing finance-related taxonomies, including the organization’s chart of accounts.

Existing taxonomy evaluation

Module 3: Develop Your IT Financial Data Taxonomy

The Purpose

Select and define the terms in the highest-level tiers of your IT financial data taxonomy.

Key Benefits Achieved

Learn best practices for creating a high-utility taxonomy that will last.
Connect the dots between what you want to do on the financial management front and how your taxonomy will help you do it.
Have a rationalized and validated list of tier-one and tier-two terms that meaningfully reflect the true breadth of your IT cost landscape.

Activities

Outputs

3.1

Examine Info-Tech’s IT Cost Model.

3.2

Discuss taxonomy development best practices.

3.3

Review IT financial use cases previously identified to establish what the taxonomy must represent.

3.4

Draft first two tiers of IT financial data taxonomy (including definitions).

First draft of IT financial taxonomy

Module 4: Test Taxonomy and Plan Implementation

The Purpose

Finalize your IT financial data taxonomy and plan future activities including taxonomy implementation and related financial-date improvement initiatives.

Key Benefits Achieved

Have a tested and completed IT financial data taxonomy that is comprehensive and robust.
Draft a plan with key stakeholders for systematically rolling out your IT financial data taxonomy over time that is sensitive to existing obstacles and opportunities.
Craft a longlist of next-step IT financial data rehabilitation and optimization initiatives.

Activities

Outputs

4.1

Review/revise two-tier taxonomy draft and add selected third tiers.

Final draft of IT financial taxonomy

4.2

Test taxonomy utility using real IT financial data.

4.3

Identify taxonomy implementation obstacles and opportunities.

List of implementation obstacles and opportunities

4.4

Draft a high-level taxonomy implementation plan.

Draft of IT financial taxonomy implementation plan

4.5

Brainstorm other IT financial data improvement initiatives.

List of additional IT financial data improvement initiatives

Module 5: Next Steps and Wrap-Up (offsite)

The Purpose

Put the finishing touches on all workshop deliverables and plan next steps.

Key Benefits Achieved

Have a clear vision and action plan for finalizing the standardization of your IT financial data.
Understand how your IT financial data enables other IT financial management capabilities.

Activities

Outputs

5.1

Complete in-progress deliverables from previous four days.

Completed IT financial taxonomy
Completed IT financial taxonomy implementation plan
List of related IT financial data improvement initiatives

5.2

Set up review time for workshop deliverables and to discuss next steps.

Develop a Fit-for-Purpose IT Financial Taxonomy visualization

Take the first step in getting your IT financial data house in order.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Table of Contents

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Get the help you need in this 4-phase advisory process. You'll receive 9 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.

Guided Implementation 1: Set your objectives

Call 1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges.

Guided Implementation 2: Discover your IT financial data

Call 1: Explore financial data discovery approaches.
Call 2: Review data discovery findings and obstacles.

Guided Implementation 3: Develop your IT financial data taxonomy

Call 1: Examine Info-Tech’s IT Cost Model.
Call 2: Discuss taxonomy development best practices.
Call 3: Review IT financial use cases previously identified to establish what your taxonomy must represent.
Call 4: Draft first two tiers of IT financial data taxonomy (including definitions).