Tasos Christidis

The advantages of the cloud and specifically Software as a Service (SaaS) are very well known. Everybody’s talking about them all over the net, at forums and in the pre-sales calls of the cloud companies. People are talking about financial benefits that SaaS brings in their P&L, several cost saving factors, security, portability and access etc. One more advantage that is less frequently discussed is this of the agility that SaaS brings in the entire I.T. function, structure and governance. In this post I’d like to focus on this exact point, thinking that maybe it is usually understated.

In this post I’d like to approach the issue of whether and how Software as a Service (delivered of course through cloud technology – don’t let them tell you otherwise!) can assist an organization implement an IT chargeback / showback strategy. For those that haven’t heard the terms before, IT chargeback is the methodology or strategy that applies/allocates Information Technology costs on the business unit that is actually using an I.T. resource (be it software, hardware, professional IT services etc.) Chargeback can go as far as internal expense management where the business unit actually experiences cash outflow (or budget consumption) in order to implement an IT function. In other cases, there is no actual cash movement; all calculations are done on reporting level only in order to have a clear image of the costs incurred by each business unit to the organization, for planning and budgeting purposes. This is called “IT showback” where numbers are “shown” but are not actually “c...