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	November 6, 2009 (updated November 24, 2009) Best Practices In IT Financial Management The Foundation For Running IT Like A Business by Craig Symons with Sharyn Leaver, Tim DeGennaro	Average: 9  (7 ratings)

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Executive Summary

In a recent Forrester survey of 84 enterprise IT decision-makers, only 52% said that they have a formal IT chargeback process in place. It is difficult to run IT like a business when the product appears to be free to customers but costs the business hundreds of millions of dollars to operate — which is precisely what happens when IT costs are not charged back to its customers. Instead, CIOs should embrace full cost transparency, which requires IT to operate like a service provider with a catalog of products and services aligned with its customers' needs, defined cost models for each service, an understanding of the demand drivers, and a process to track and invoice its customers based on their consumption of those services. Forrester has identified a number of best practices that leading organizations have used to make this transition to full cost transparency.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Most Firms Fail To Understand IT Costs
• Six Best Practices For Transparent IT

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This is an excerpt