Timothy:
Right you are. We did charge back. We were basically trying to do it
by division.
Every year we would send out a final bill and the divisions grumbled
but paid.
What we did not notice was that the total was off by 30 percent (not
charging enough).
One of our people finally found it (THE Execution Batch monitor)
wasn't being charged for.
When that was corrected we sent out corrected bills. The one division
that grew their bill by at least 30 percent. They howled like a stuck
pig.
The corporate people took notice (about time) and put the division up
for sale and they sold it (within a year I think).
Once that monster was taken out of the bill the other 2-3 divisions
started to get nervous about how much they were going to get charged.
The bills went out.. everyone was in shock.
Two or three years later the IS division was sent to Florida where it
has gone through hell (very few people went and those that did
weren't the good performers) and of course the political types went
and they got what they deserved. SO there can be a lot of secondary
"problems" with billing.
Ed
On Jun 14, 2012, at 12:25 AM, Timothy Sipples wrote:
A couple other thoughts:
1. Mainframe-only chargeback regimes are deadly. If you actually
look at
the total IT budget, all things mainframe-related typically consume a
rather small fraction of the total IT budget. If you have
chargebacks, and
if they don't reflect that reality, then you're already in trouble.
Yes, I
know that z/OS has SMF which provides wonderful data that
accountants can
easily misuse -- and yes, I know other systems don't have anything
like SMF
built in. So go get system accounting software for those other
systems if
you're going to have chargebacks -- and add the cost of
implementing and
maintaining that software to those other systems' chargebacks!
2. Average costs versus marginal costs. If you simply take the total
expense and divide that up into chargebacks, you've got a problem.
That'll
cause very bad behavior as users try to flee what they see as high
costs
(average costs) which really truly aren't (they're actually marginal
costs). One better way (albeit not perfect) is to charge an
unavoidable,
universal "membership fee" (per employee, for example) plus a variable
rate, with the variable rate equal to true marginal costs. That's
similar
to your electric bill -- a "connection fee" plus a charge per kilowatt
hour. Bonus points for peak and non-peak pricing. Non-peak could
even be
zero.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------
Timothy Sipples
Resident Enterprise Architect (Based in Singapore)
E-Mail: timothy.sipp...@us.ibm.com
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