Patent ID: 7353212

Claim:
A method in a computer system for assigning a monetary cost to a computer transaction, the method comprising: identifying two or more information technology services utilized to execute the computer transaction, wherein the information technology services include telephone services, network access services, maintenance services, software services, support services, and hardware services; determining a monetary computer transaction cost associated with the two or more services utilized to execute the transaction, wherein determining the monetary computer transaction cost comprises: (1) identifying each resource utilized to provide the two or more services, wherein a portion of an original cost or a depreciated cost of each identified resource is assigned to the computer transaction, (2) determining a quality cost that represents a cost for a level of quality of each of the two or more services utilized to execute the transaction, wherein the quality cost for each of the two or more services comprises an availability cost that represents the cost for the availability of each of the two or more services and a response time cost that represents the cost of the response time for each of the two or more services, and (3) combining the portion of the original cost or depreciated cost and the quality cost to define the monetary computer transaction cost for each identified resource utilized to provide the two or more services; and summing the monetary computer transaction cost for each identified resource to determine the monetary cost for the computer transaction in order to pass the monetary cost for the computer transaction to a user executing the computer transaction.