Charging users for IT costs can rein in budgets and bring rigour to planning, but it can also turn you into an unpopular bean counter.
Reader ROI
- Why chargeback's goals are so laudable
- What CIOs have done to realise the benefits of charge-back and avoid the pitfalls
- How to know whether chargeback is right for you
With CIO budgets under pressure, there's an almost irresistible allure to the notion of chargeback, wherein IT costs are literally charged back to the user departments on whose behalf they were incurred. In this way, the IT budget stops being an ever-expanding money pit, endlessly consuming hardware, software and bandwidth - and instead the tab is picked up by the people who actually use the stuff. At a stroke, budget justifications become a cinch. "Of course we need this level of expenditure," the CIO can assure the board. "If we didn't, the users wouldn't be ponying up the money for it." Even better, the shock of actually having to pay for what they consume transforms users from hungry conventioneers at an all-you-can-eat buffet into disciplined dieters.
No wonder, then, that chargeback's proponents are so enthusiastic about its merits. Bob Odenheimer, for example, believes chargeback not only shifts the burden of IT expenditure justification onto the newly cost-conscious users but also injects a note of rigour into the enterprise's business model. "If you look at a small business, its IT costs are reflected in its profitability," says Odenheimer, senior vice president of IT operations and telecommunications at managed behavioural health services provider Magellan Health Services. "It buys the gear - and has to pay for it. Why should it be any different at a large business?"
It's more than just a question of even-handedness. When IT expenses are retained within an overall IT budget, rather than charged back to departmental cost centres, companies can't get a handle on the real costs of winning new business, complains Odenheimer. "If it helps their unit's profitability, there's nothing to stop them from taking as much IT as they can get - even if the actual IT cost [to the business as a whole] is higher than the revenue it produces [on the unit level]," he says. Chargeback, in Odenheimer's view, prevents that by forcing users to reconcile within their own budget the marginal cost and marginal profitability of new business.
Bob Svec, president of TSL, a chargeback consultancy in the US, sees a chargeback-related slant on the age-old centralisation versus decentralisation debate. Chargeback, asserts Svec, "offers the best of both worlds. You've got the efficiencies of centralisation, combined with the ability to let people see what they are getting, and how much they are paying for it."
Taken together, such arguments have quickly elevated chargeback into so-called best practices territory. Consultants laud its merits, and vendors have sprung up to handle the dollars and cents of charging. But CIOs have found a dark side to chargeback too. It can become a political hot potato and an administrative nightmare. Many CIOs have come up with workarounds, but others find chargeback so problematic that they've sworn off it entirely.
The essential difficulty with chargeback is a conceptual one. Weighing the pig, critics charge, doesn't actually make it any heavier. Shouldn't IT resources be spent on, well, IT, rather than on figuring out who owes what to whom? And isn't the allocation of IT resources better carried out by, say, a steering committee than by a clerk with a spreadsheet?
The Trouble with Chargeback:"What Forest? All We See Are Trees"
Richard Scannell, co-founder and vice president of corporate development and strategy at Massachusetts-based consultancy GlassHouse Technologies, observed the use of chargeback while at Motorola, where he spent 12 years as a senior IT manager, ultimately heading up a group of 160 IT people in Chicago. Chargeback at Motorola was based on headcount. That works in theory, says Scannell, but in practice quickly turns sour.
"If the electric company turned around and said: There's 2000 people in your town, and we're going to divide the town's usage by 2000 and charge each of you a two-hundredth of the total, then you'd likely object," he says. "If it doesn't work with power, why should it work with IT?"
In reality, Scannell contends, people don't consume resources evenly - nor do IT systems. "A lot of data is held in databases, not files, and is accessed by multiple functions and multiple people - how do you even begin to charge back in that scenario?" he says. Then there's the problem of people moving about the organisation. "If I have a lot of files associated with an individual working in human resources, what happens if that individual moves to marketing? Does marketing get charged for human resources' files?" Because of unanswered questions like these, Scannell chose to do without chargeback at Motorola.
Kevin Vitale, president and CEO of Ejasent, a chargeback software vendor, sees a link between chargeback and poor server utilisation. Data centres typically have server utilisations on the order of 10 per cent to 15 per cent, he asserts, which in normal circumstances would prompt a server rationalisation project. "But then, chargeback gets more complicated," he says. With one server per application or per business unit, chargeback is relatively straightforward. Combine applications on a server, however, and the arguments begin over how big a tab each department should pay.
It's precisely such wrangles - or rather, the prospect of them - that influences John Nordin's decision to hold back from full-blooded chargeback in favour of a less contentious middle ground. "I've worked in IT environments where every single IT expense was allocated back out, leaving IT as basically a zero-cost operation," says Nordin, vice president and CIO of specialty metals manufacturer A M Castle. "But it's way too much work. It's a never-ending debate over what constitutes a fair share. In the end, it comes down to this: What am I being paid to do? And I think I'm being paid to do more that just debate MIPS and CPU cycles."
That's not an exaggeration. When working for a multibillion-dollar health-care company in the mid to late 1980s, Nordin recalls, "we had an entire department within IT called IT accounting. And that was all it did: count MIPS." There's no way, he insists, that he's ever going to manufacture that much red tape himself.
Making Chargeback Work: Simplify, Simplify
So how, then, does Nordin charge back at A M Castle?
"We don't try to charge back everything, nor do we avoid chargeback altogether," he says. His golden rule is that he charges only for things that are inarguable. "I charge for nonshared IT expenses where I can put my hand on my heart and say: 'This is your expense.' So it's things like printers, phones, fax machines - that sort of stuff," he says. Business applications, on the other hand, reside at the centre on a number of servers and are not charged out. "We tend to bring that sort of expense up to the top, and call it IT budget," he says. "We're running a lean business in a lean industry, and the idea of having people running around pushing numbers just appals me."
Of course, business applications can account for the majority of enterprise IT spending. Some CIOs have figured out how to charge back those costs without getting swamped. B Lee Jones, CIO of Stratex Networks, a manufacturer of wireless transmission equipment, sits down with the company controller at the start of the budgeting process to review chargeback allocations "to make sure that they are reasonable. After that," says Jones, "the system pretty much runs itself."
And runs itself fairly efficiently too. Stratex has no one employed in either the finance or IT functions whose primary responsibility is operating the chargeback scheme within the company, says Jones. He estimates that it probably takes no more than a couple of hours a month to work out the allocations.
Which sounds reasonable. On the other hand, the company's IT systems undeniably lend themselves to such a lean and laid-back approach. Jones sits atop an IT infrastructure populated by almost every vendor known to man. "All our projects are user-driven, which is why we've wound up as a best-of-breed shop," he says. "We'll always pick the best application for a particular function."
The result is considerable simplification of the chargeback process, since each application is run by a single group of users. The PeopleSoft app is charged to the human resources department. Agile? Charged to document control and quality assurance. Oracle? The manufacturing part gets charged to manufacturing operations, the finance part to the finance function. Clarify? That would be the maintenance and repair function. Siebel? Charged back to sales. PC technical support gets charged back based on the number of PCs each function has, while storage is charged back based on each function's headcount. There is some central overhead, but most of it is charged out, using such straightforward allocation rules as headcount.
The underlying philosophy of chargeback at Stratex is simplicity and practicality. "We don't put any monitoring timers on equipment in order to see how it's used," Jones says. "We assume that usage will be a normalised distribution both within individual departments and across the enterprise." In other words, over time, the assumption is that any inconsistencies will average out.
But will they? While not every organisation's business apps can be divvied up so tidily as Stratex's, CIOs can still apply simplicity and practicality to chargeback. For example, after Magellan Health Services' Odenheimer charges back at actual cost any expenses that can clearly be identified within a particular business unit or site, he adds up other expenses such as LAN and desktop support costs and allocates them on a headcount basis - on the assumption that IT support costs will be evenly spread. "As they will be," he insists, "if you use the right desktop tools" to standardise user PCs around an approved configuration.
Furthermore, Odenheimer retains a specialist company to analyse all telephone, fax and data line invoices, screen them for errors, and then break them out by business unit or department. "They always find something - always," he says. "It's an ROI of 300 per cent - they save us three times what we're paying them."
Change With - or Without - Chargeback
Chargeback is no panacea for getting a handle on an enterprise's IT spending, and there is no perfect chargeback system. Nordin of A M Castle has no quarrel with chargeback's theoretical advantages - just its practical downside. "Would I ever espouse a full chargeback system?" he muses. "Yes, but only if I could get a 100 per cent metered technical process in place - which in our environment is unlikely." The difficulty: a mix of mainframe boxes, Unix and NT servers, packaged software, and homegrown systems. "Vendors are looking at the problem from the data centre perspective, but that's only part of it," he says. "In reality, people have phones and BlackBerrys and PDAs as well - so I don't believe we're going to get there any time soon."
Ultimately, chargeback is meant to prod users into changing their behaviour. If a chargeback system fails to accomplish that, it's a failure, no matter how good the accounting is. Chargeback is wearily familiar to Keith Kaczanowski, vice president of process improvement at Brady Corporation, a manufacturer of signs, labels and associated printing equipment. "If all you do is reshuffle costs within the company, then chargeback probably isn't worth it," he says. "But if you think that people will make better decisions by being forced to confront the cost, then there is value.
"We used to charge $X per person per year, but found no one changed any decisions," concludes Kaczanowski. "Instead, they just grumbled about a perception of low value. So now we don't charge out at all." It was, he adds, "pretty much a consensus decision. A lot of our IT expenses turned out to be for enterprisewide activities - servers, WANs and enterprise applications. Taking it back does a better job of matching where the decision is taken to where the costs are."
The Dark Side of the Force
Misused chargeback can increase IT spending
Chargeback can be improperly applied, with disastrous results. A faulty chargeback system led to outrageous IT costs at USAA, a $US10 billion financial services company that serves US military personnel and their families. The experience with chargeback contributed to the company's decision to split the IT function into a stand-alone business unit, says Steve Yates, who in most other businesses would go by the title of CIO, but instead is styled as the president and CEO of USAA's Information Technology, an entity legally separate from the parent company.
A simplistic application of chargeback, recalls Yates, had led USAA into a high-cost death spiral by the time he arrived in 1999. Directly linked to divisional revenue, the cost allotments bore no fixed relation to IT usage. And with charges set at the beginning of each fiscal year, no adjustments were made in the event that divisional usage came in under budget or that planned expenditures weren't made. The result, he says, was a chargeback system that produced the wrong kind of behaviour. "IT costs kept climbing - it was a kind of creeping socialism, with people saying: Hey, I'm being taxed for it, so I'll have more of it. Year after year, IT costs would ratchet upwards," Yates says. By the end, IT expenditure was growing four times faster than company revenue, a rate that was clearly unsustainable.
Prior to Yates' appointment, a decision had already been made to move away from chargeback and instead to adopt a kind of "internal outsourcing" model, where divisional charges were more directly linked to costs - meaning that the business units effectively outsourced IT to the IT function, but on a pay-as-you-go basis, buying the functionality they needed and no more. But things went from bad to worse in Yates' first year. Inaccurate assumptions about utilisation rates, unexpected indirect costs and wildly uneven programming requirements over the calendar year led to a sea of red ink - and red faces, as Yates and his equally new CEO scrambled to first explain what had gone wrong and then prevent it from ever happening again.
Yates has since brought IT costs under control. Horror stories of roomfuls of junked PCs (still on lease and still on maintenance) at locations across the US are now a distant memory, IT headcount has dropped from 3800 to 2700, and overall IT spending as a percentage of revenue has fallen by 3.5 per cent since 1999, Yates says. He is left with an appreciation for the power of chargeback to change behaviour - but not always in the manner intended.
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