Lolita Budget

3.6 Presenting the budget

Budgets are just proposals that need to be presented across different arenas such as: federal or national government agencies, legislative bodies, non-profit organizations, and other critical stakeholder groups. When presenting the financial plan, Lolita needs to clarify the expected results using a performance framework that links performance measures and targets with the components of the projects and its budget. The financial plan for digital government projects is susceptible of changes and adjustments when presenting them across these audiences. For presentation purpose, Lolita found useful tools for presenting budgets such as: defining strategic gaps between actual versus expected targets, benchmarks, and standards.

Budget control activities involve effective follow-up tools and systems for budget allocation and budget allotment. Allocation refers to the process of designation of resources for a particular purpose according to a plan. Allotment refers to the budgetary process that schedules allocations over a fiscal period ("calendarization"). From a budgetary perspective, these allocation and allotment tools and systems need to be implemented to control the progress of digital government initiatives by using objects of expenditures or line items specified in budget plans. These line items represent codes that apply existing general budget classifications discussed in the organizing data section, but with more specific considerations for our digital government initiatives. Each of these line items codes implies a group of rules, policies and evaluation criteria for operation that need to be defined and monitored over time and across organizational units. The purpose of budget control is to identify variances between what is budgeted and what is spent. Variance analysis during budget control and monitoring helps to identify potential factors that causing funding or financing delays or inhibit advancing digital government initiatives. Performance evaluation represents a critical step in the process of financing digital government

The vision of those responsible in digital government projects is to at least consider them for a successful design and implementation of these type of initiatives. Towards this direction, this chapter helps to identify the economic and management issues of financing and resourcing digital government initiatives. The main argument is that financing and resourcing digital government involves an exercise of defining several aspects before financing or investing in a particular digital government initiative or project. These aspects are not just financially-prone but in the economic and management dimensions. The economic aspects embrace the need to define the goals of the expected impacts of the digital government tools and applications over the costs of production and levels of productivity of users and the government (efficiency) and over the distribution of the benefits across different stakeholders (equity). Another economic tool was the alignment of digital government projects with the proper financial sources of funding and specific expenditure destinations (earmarking). In terms of management considerations, this chapter covered several recommendations for estimating the revenue structure, organizing budget data, and formulating operating budgets including current and capital budgets. Aspects of elaborating, presenting and implementing a