Many IT Service and Support organizations use a budgeting model that scrutinizes each dollar spent every year. This is called zero-base budgeting.

Each year departments start from scratch, building budgets based on the spend from the previous year. With a fresh start and justification of each expense, IT Service and Support ensures that inappropriate costs are not built into the future. There are important items that will come up with each IT service and support budget that will need justification each new budgeting period. If money is going to be allocated, the service desk should know the desired outcome and benefit to the business. IT lives and breathes hardware, software and headcount. Justifying these expenses should be simple. At least that’s the hope.

Hardware. A large majority of Samanage customers are reporting increases in hardware spend for 2016 due to company growth, new projects and replacement needs. Hardware can require a significant expenditure (i.e. network servers, desktops/laptops/tablets, printers, screens/projectors, and mobile devices). Before budgeting, it’s important to understand the business goals and forecasts for the upcoming year instead of relying on what was done the previous year. As a simple example, if the organization is moving to a BYOD strategy, IT Service and Support needs to make the necessary increases/decreases to the annual hardware spend based on the disposal or recycling process of old equipment.

SOURCE: samanage.com