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#1454 Add FinOps to FMIT change request pending

FMIT lacks reference to Cloud Financial Operations, cost optimization, and resource attribution.

Many elements of Cloud Financial Operations (FinOps) is covered under FMIT and other areas.

However, the FMIT section does not refer to or recognize FinOps as a Financial function in any way. There is considerable reference to Accounting terms and training, but no mention of FinOps at all. The FMIT section should be updated to refer to FinOps and, perhaps, the FinOps foundation, their training (finops.org), and FinOps certifications (FinOps Certified Practitioner and FinOps Certified Professional).

Additionally, FMIT does not mention cost optimization, particularly relevant for cloud deployments where numerous techniques can be employed to manage and reduce cost (resource scheduling, committed-use discounts/reservations, right-sizing, 

Finally, FMIT makes no mention of Attributing resources (and therefore cost) to specific business units for cost management, reporting and chargeback. This could be part of FMIT or, perhaps, included in Asset Management (ASMG).

Proposed change applies to Financial management

Current status of this request: pending

Matthew Burrows
Sep 16, 2022 02:54 PM

Thanks for the input. Can you give us some recommendations for the activity statements associated with FinOps? As SFIA skill descriptions are activity based, we wouldn't necessarily focus on referring to functions - in the guidance notes we could mention FinOps as an example where this skill would be relevant, but I guess our main concern would be to pick up any activity that SFIA doesn't currently cover/define, and make sure it is included in appropriate places - whether that is FMIT or elsewhere.

Derek O'Harrow
Sep 22, 2022 02:32 PM

It would take a while to come up with a comprehensive list, but here are some high-level examples:
- Create cloud charging strategy and/or policy
- Define tags, metadata, and organizational taxonomy
- Evaluate, Select, Deploy & Configure FinOps tooling
- Define FinOps KPIs/OKRs
- Inventory cloud deployments
- Allocate cloud resource costs to budget lines/cost centres
- Reconciles and pays cloud invoices
- Performs recharging for cloud resources
- Govern, Manage, Audit and Enforce cloud resource tagging
- Influences Cloud Workload Placement based on commercial considerations
- Inputs into Cloud supplier selection processes
- Captures future cloud demand and produces cloud demand and spend forecast
- Create cloud spend reports
- Conduct cloud spend analysis
- Identify cost optimization opportunities
- trigger cloud optimization activity
- Record and track FinOps risks
- Measure and report FinOps KPIs/OKRs
- Define Quotas, Usage Thresholds and Alerts
- Define FinOps processes
- Synchronizing actual & planned cloud spend with official budgets & plans
- Helping Application teams identify work-load level cost efficiency targets
- Lead buying strategy to capture savings via reserved instances; VM spot pricing; etc.
- Business Unit Economics - translate cloud spend into cost per customer/transaction

SFIA Updates Manager
Sep 22, 2022 03:35 PM

Hi Derek - thanks for doing this and for your interest in updating SFIA. This looks a great topic for detailed investigation. I've sent you an email to the address you used to register on the SFIA website.
best
Peter Leather