Governance and Communication
Apply appropriate oversight and communication approaches to ensure that business unit stakeholders understand and have buy-in to cost allocation and recovery policies.
Improvement Planning
Practices-Outcomes-Metrics (POM)
Representative POMs are described for Governance and Communication at each level of maturity.
- 1Initial
- Practice
- An IT accounting model is used on a best endeavour basis.
- 2Basic
- Practice
- Commence simple gathering and reporting of IT cost elements to help visualize the overall IT costs, for some business units.
- Outcomes
- There is basic usage of an IT accounting model.
- Basic gathering & reporting of some IT costs occurs, e.g. these may be aggregated into 4–8 categories some of which can be clearly allocated to some business units.
- Metric
- Frequency of reporting of IT cost allocations.
- 3Intermediate
- Practice
- Ensure participation of both IT and Finance in the AA model.
- Outcome
- A better understanding is promoted across the organization of the IT costs pertaining to particular business units.
- Metrics
- IT Productivity: [Cost per standard IT output].
- % of IT costs charged back to business by projects and services.
- 4Advanced
- Practice
- Ensure participation of IT and Finance and other business units in the AA model.
- Outcomes
- There is clear understanding of AA model is established across the organization and this influences consumption.
- The model is used by IT, Finance, and other business units.
- A wider understanding of the IT AA model influences consumption.
- By making the accounting of IT costs visible to business units, end users are encouraged to adapt their resource usage as appropriate.
- Metric
- Relative Value Added: [IT-attributable Value Added per IT Resource Unit (VAITRU)].
- 5Optimized
- Practice
- Ensure that IT accounting is used in the strategic decision-making process across the business ecosystem e.g. for budgeting and portfolio planning.
- Outcome
- By using the AA model in strategic decision-making across the business ecosystem the comprehensive and accurate view of IT costs enables the IT function to support strategic decisions and to (re-)prioritize IT investment in line with the shifting priorities of business initiatives.
- Metrics
- % of relevant costs directly charged back to business.
- Absolute Value Added: [IT attributable Value created (ITVA) per IT Resource Unit (ITRU)].
- Net Present Value (NPV) of IT projects.