In my career I've worked in a variety of companies, small and large, centralized IT and decentralized IT, and the issue of resources has come up in almost every one. It seems there is never enough resources for every department, and that includes IT resources. So how do you allocate limited resources among departments?
For most of my career it's been a political process. Either someone convinces my boss to allocate them more resources or they're a squeaky enough wheel that I decide to do it. In either case, it's been a subjective decision as to how many resources each department gets from IT.
I ran across a blog from Buck Woody recently on SQL Server Chargeback. Chargeback is a concept that I haven't seen in a long time, really since I worked at a large company with a mainframe. Back in those days there was a huge shared resource in terms of computing systems with the mainframe, and excessive usage by one group could really impact all others. So each department was "charged" an amount based on their usage, and their budget was deducted that amount with those monies moved to the IT group. That worked fine until most departments started to purchase their own PCs and software. This allowed each department to not have as large a fraction of their budget sucked away for IT costs and still get work done.
I'm not sure how good an idea chargeback is for a company. I see both the positives and negatives from an organizational structure, and Buck has a few nice comments on the various things you could charge for. I think too complex or details an analysis is a waste of time, but I'd like to see a regular, high level view that talks about how much storage and how many servers each group is using. Not to charge them, but just to see at a rough level how IT usage is distributed, and allow management to determine if the groups that heavily use IT (or under-utilize it) are appropriate for the company.
I think it makes some sense to look at how "non-business" use of IT impacts the company. There will always be jokes, MP3s, and other uses of technology that don't directly contribute to the business, but do help improve employee morale. I wouldn't worry about eradicating these, but I would be concerned if any significant percentage of my network was taken up by music or video files for entertainment.
I think we should view IT resources the same way. Not try to control or charge for them in any great detail, but have a general overview that allows us to gauge if we are spending our IT dollars wisely.
Steve Jones
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