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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
