Visualizing IT Budget to Improve Stakeholder Communication in the Decision Making Process
Traditionally in large enterprises, budget cuts are a treat for IT departments. One way to guard IT budget is visualizing the impacts in IT services of such cuts. Data visualization tools are capable of bridging the gap between increased data availability
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stract. Traditionally in large enterprises, budget cuts are a treat for IT departments. One way to guard IT budget is visualizing the impacts in IT services of such cuts. Data visualization tools are capable of bridging the gap between increased data availability and human cognitive capabilities. In this paper, we present a budget visualization tool that allows enterprise wide data-driven decision-making. Our proposal was developed in the context of a large multi-industry state-owned company, with rigid control structures and external pressures for cost reduction and investment optimization. Our tool promotes visualization as the main mechanism to justify IT budget requests and to defend from budget amendments and cuts. We propose a generic tool that might manage different perceptions from many parts of an organization. However, to evaluate our tool’s effectiveness we incorporated four stakeholder’s perspectives: financial, technical, business’ clients and supply chain. In our efforts, we developed a data model that encapsulates these four perspectives and improves communication capabilities between stakeholders. Keywords: Enterprise systems IT budget modeling Data-driven decision-making
Data visualization
Process
1 Introduction Budget creation and allocation are an integral part of running any organization efficiently and effectively. Budgets not only serve as planning mechanisms but also as a starting point for controlling programs within organizations. The traditional approach to understand budgets is: given a certain amount of money, how much will be allocated to each of the required expenses? Budgets serve both to determine how much to spend and to judge spending performances [1]. “A budget is a set of interlinked plans that quantitatively describe an entity’s projected future operations” [2]. Budgeting typically begins with strategic planning at senior management level, and lower level managers in the organization are asked to defend their budgets assessing execution and possible budget cut impacts. Most of the organizations are software and data driven nowadays. The amount of information available is increasing rapidly, and data visualization tools are capable of © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing AG 2016. All Rights Reserved A.M. Tjoa et al. (Eds.): CONFENIS 2016, LNBIP 268, pp. 277–290, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-49944-4_21
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bridging the gap between the data daily increment and the organizational human cognitive capabilities. IT budget needs to be documented, so that its management becomes explicit and visible to involved stakeholders. If IT budget is not properly documented, external pressures could result in budget cuts that could consciously or unconsciously compromise IT business services. In this paper, we present a budget visualization tool, which can be used to support and improve budget negotiation, and to analyze the possible impacts on IT services, caused by budget cuts. Moreover, the p
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