Inquiry Spotlight: IT Chargeback, Q2 2009

Charging back for IT services has been a controversial practice for many years, so much so that a significant number of organizations have either never implemented IT chargeback or have stopped the practice. Past crude allocation mechanisms provided no real insight into IT costs and led to the perception that the cost of IT always seemed to exceed its value. Lately, the difficult global economic environment, the emergence of service portfolio management processes, the maturation of service catalog solutions, and increasing demands from executive management and business leadership for more IT cost transparency have combined to motivate CIOs to rethink IT chargeback. This is evidenced in recent inquiry trends where questions about IT chargeback have emerged as a hot topic.