|
IT Chargeback And Showback
IT chargeback and IT showback (memo-back) are two policies used by information technology (IT) departments to allocate and/or bill the costs associated with each department's or division's usage. Chargeback The need to understand the components of the costs of IT, and to fund the IT organization in the face of unexpected demands from user departments, led to the development of chargeback mechanisms, in which a requesting department gets an internal bill (or "cross-charge") for the costs that are directly associated to the infrastructure, data transfer, application licenses, training, etc., which they generate. The purpose of chargeback includes: * Making departments responsible in their usage, e.g., refrain from asking for resources they are not going to use * Providing visibility to the head of IT and to senior management on the reasons behind the costs of IT * Allowing the IT department to respond to unexpected customer demand by saying "yes, we can do it, but you will have to p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Information Technology
Information technology (IT) is the use of computers to create, process, store, retrieve, and exchange all kinds of data . and information. IT forms part of information and communications technology (ICT). An information technology system (IT system) is generally an information system, a communications system, or, more specifically speaking, a computer system — including all hardware, software, and peripheral equipment — operated by a limited group of IT users. Although humans have been storing, retrieving, manipulating, and communicating information since the earliest writing systems were developed, the term ''information technology'' in its modern sense first appeared in a 1958 article published in the ''Harvard Business Review''; authors Harold J. Leavitt and Thomas L. Whisler commented that "the new technology does not yet have a single established name. We shall call it information technology (IT)." Their definition consists of three categories: techniques for pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Costing
Cost accounting is defined as "a systematic set of procedures for recording and reporting measurements of the cost of manufacturing goods and performing services in the aggregate and in detail. It includes methods for recognizing, classifying, allocating, aggregating and reporting such costs and comparing them with standard costs." (IMA) Often considered a subset of managerial accounting, its end goal is to advise the management on how to optimize business practices and processes based on cost efficiency and capability. Cost accounting provides the detailed cost information that management needs to control current operations and plan for the future. Cost accounting information is also commonly used in financial accounting, but its primary function is for use by managers to facilitate their decision-making. Origins of Cost Accounting All types of businesses, whether manufacturing, trading or producing services, require cost accounting to track their activities. Cost accounting h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Budget
A budget is a calculation play, usually but not always financial, for a defined period, often one year or a month. A budget may include anticipated sales volumes and revenues, resource quantities including time, costs and expenses, environmental impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions, other impacts, assets, liabilities and cash flows. Companies, governments, families, and other organizations use budgets to express strategic plans of activities in measurable terms. A budget expresses intended expenditures along with proposals for how to meet them with resources. A budget may express a surplus, providing resources for use at a future time, or a deficit in which expenditures exceed income or other resources. Government The budget of a government is a summary or plan of the anticipated resources (often but not always from taxes) and expenditures of that government. There are three types of government budget: the operating or current budget, the capital or investment budget, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Electricity Bill
Electricity pricing (also referred to as electricity tariffs or the price of electricity) can vary widely by country or by locality within a country. Electricity prices are dependent on many factors, such as the price of power generation, government taxes or subsidies, taxes, local weather patterns, transmission and distribution infrastructure, and multi-tiered industry regulation. The pricing or tariffs can also differ depending on the customer-base, typically by residential, commercial, and industrial connections. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), "Electricity prices generally reflect the cost to build, finance, maintain, and operate power plants and the electricity grid." Where pricing forecasting is the method by which a generator, a utility company, or a large industrial consumer can predict the wholesale prices of electricity with reasonable accuracy. Due to the complications of electricity generation, the cost to supply electricity varies mi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each of which is a data center. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and typically uses a "pay as you go" model, which can help in reducing capital expenses but may also lead to unexpected operating expenses for users. Value proposition Advocates of public and hybrid clouds claim that cloud computing allows companies to avoid or minimize up-front IT infrastructure costs. Proponents also claim that cloud computing allows enterprises to get their applications up and running faster, with improved manageability and less maintenance, and that it enables IT teams to more rapidly adjust resources to meet fluctuating and unpredictable demand, providing burst computing capability: high computing p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Virtual Chargeback
In information technology, virtual chargeback is a practice of charging back the costs of virtual IT infrastructure to departments or business units, that actually use it. This means analyzing and recording the resource utilisation on virtual machines (VMs). Definition and purpose of chargeback in a virtual context The idea of chargeback A chargeback is a return of money to a payer of a transaction, especially a credit card transaction. Most commonly the payer is a consumer. The chargeback reverses a money transfer from the consumer's bank account, line of credit, or credit ca ... in a traditional (non-virtualised) sense is not new, and references go as far back as the 1980s. Publications available on the Internet generally support the notion that chargeback involved charging departments based on actual resource consumption rather than forecast usage. Chargeback is most relevant to IT departments, simply because almost all areas of an organisation use computing resources. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Financial Management For IT Services (ITSM)
Financial Management for IT Services is a Service Strategy element of the ITIL best practice framework. The aim of this ITIL process area is to give accurate and cost effective stewardship of IT assets and resources used in providing IT Services. It is used to plan, control and recover costs expended in providing the IT Services negotiated and agreed to in a service-level agreement (SLA). Goal The goal of Financial Management for IT Services (ITFM) is to optimize the cost of IT Services while taking into account quality and risk factors. The analysis balances cost against quality and risk to create intelligent, metric-based cost optimization strategies. Balancing is required since cost cutting may not be the best strategy to deliver optimum consumer outputs. ITFM is a discipline based on standard financial and accounting principles, but addresses specific principles that are applicable to IT services, such as fixed asset management, capital management, audit, and depreciation. F ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Information Technology Management
Information technology management or IT management is the discipline whereby all of the information technology resources of a firm are managed in accordance with its needs and priorities. Managing the responsibility within a company entails many of the basic management functions, like budgeting, staffing, change management, and organizing and controlling, along with other aspects that are unique to technology, like software design, network planning, tech support etc. Purpose The central aim of IT management is to generate value through the use of technology. To achieve this, business strategies and technology must be aligned. IT Management is different from management information systems. The latter refers to management methods tied to the automation or support of human decision making. IT Management refers to IT related management activities in organizations. MIS is focused mainly on the business aspect, with a strong input into the technology phase of the business/organization ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
