Would you a like beverage with that installation ?

As IT costs of installation, support and the services that IT provides seem overly difficult to track with regards to a dollar value a new way is being proposed. 
It seems that organizations have a difficult time measuring the cost of their IT department.  There are 3 common ways that It cost is measured today.  An article here that explains the 3 ways and a possible new way to "serve it up" Ways IT gets funded.
Our interpretation of this methodology is that IT must come up with a price list similar to that of a menu in which are the array of services they provide can be costed out.  The implications of this are that IT must categorize its services by organization as to the most common tasks they do and support for the organization with enough dollar value granularity to make it accurate for accounting purposes.


In this scenario common support for hardware,software, upgrades, the cost of installing and configuring and administrating a new system, integration, development, testing, are all component costs that will have to be valued on this new menu.   The article mentioned above recommends that all IT services be broken down into 12-24 items with actual prices.  This seems manageable.


As organization consume IT services, IT would then give them a bill for the cost of that service. This can then either be charged to department, project or overall IT costs for the organization.  This methodology may not be too bad as this could provide actual costs of IT's involvement in projects, which departments consume the most services, which employees, and identify anomalies that might ordinarily be missed.  Overall it seems reasonable in the fact of how IT can get funding for new projects as costs will be identified accurately and incorporated into projects as a component of the overall project expense - but more accurate.


If this methodology were to catch on then the only problem organizations would have is how to categorize and actually come up with a costing method for the diverse services that IT provides.  An example of this would be is an architect worth more per hour in designing the overall infrastructure of the business as opposed to the support of hardware, software and administration of environments, applications, installing patches and updates, configuration for software, development for interfaces of new systems, user testing etc.  


All though this makes sense in theory will it translate to actionable and usable data to get IT projects funded.  If its not one problem its another.  Looking forward to feedback on this if you think this approach can work or not.   I can reached at info@eval-source.com