The Chargeback Conundrum

Computerworld - Launching a chargeback system to recover IT costs may sound like a simple matter of putting together an accounting spreadsheet. Depending on the organization, however, IT chargeback plans are often complex, and they involve much more than simple accounting. Chargeback gets right to the guts of corporate politics and even raises questions about the proper role for IT in an organization. While chargeback has its proponents, many IT leaders see it as a third rail -- not to be touched if you can avoid it.
"I have never heard a good reason to do chargeback," says former Ace Hardware Corp. CIO Paul Ingevaldson, who retired from the Oak Brook, Ill.-based company in December. He believes chargeback programs degrade the value of the IT shop. Instituting IT chargeback "means that the company thinks of IT as a utility instead of a strategic part of the business," Ingevaldson says. And designating IT a "utility" raises questions about its relevance, which is already a sensitive issue, he adds.
If a chargeback plan is implemented in a corporation where top management is not IT-savvy, then the divisions with the most money also win the most IT resources, while an emerging unit loses out, Ingevaldson says. He thinks the best alternative is a system where all the top management is involved in the IT oversight process and an IT steering committee makes strategic decisions.
Jeremy Lehman, senior vice president of technology at Thomson Financial in New York, agrees. "I'm not a big fan of chargeback plans," he says. "They introduce complexity and rely on subjective judgments about allocations. They turn the whole dynamic around IT into cutting costs instead of viewing IT
as a revenue maker."
Opposing View
But Chuck Darville says chargeback helps him run IT as a business. "We look to see if someone can do IT better, faster and cheaper," says Darville, technology planning director at Southern Co., a consortium of five power utilities in Atlanta.
Darville argues that companies that view IT as a cost center don't need chargeback. They can simply total all IT costs and divide by the number of workers, passing on that cost to each division. But that wouldn't provide the incentive for cost management in IT that chargeback provides, he says.
Southern, which has 26,000 employees, has set a goal of billing those internal customers whose decisions affect IT costs, "so they can see the full impact of their decision," Darville says.
That's one of the chief benefits of chargeback: helping IT users understand that speeds,