IT cost transparency
IT cost transparency is a category of information technology management software and systems that enables enterprise IT organizations to model and track the total cost to deliver and maintain the IT Services they provide to the business. It is increasingly a task of management accounting. IT cost transparency solutions can integrate financial information such as labor costs, software licensing costs, hardware acquisition and depreciation, data center facilities charges from general ledger systems and combine this with operational data from ticketing, monitoring, asset management and project portfolio management systems to provide a single, integrated view of IT costs  by service, department, GL line item and project. In addition to tracking cost elements, IT cost transparency may track utilization, usage and operational performance metrics in order to provide a measure of value or return on investment (ROI). Costs, budgets, performance metrics and changes to data points are tracked over time to identify trends and the impact of changes to underlying cost drivers in order to help managers address the key drivers in escalating IT costs and improve planning. IT cost transparency combines elements of activity based costing, business intelligence, operational monitoring and performance dashboards. It provides the system on  which to implement ITIL v3 Financial Management guidelines to assist with Financial Management for IT services and is closely related to IT Service Management. Capabilities. While specific solutions vary, capabilities can include: Analysts' comments. "“Globalization, consumerization, new competitors and new service models are radically ‘changing the shape of IT’. IT leaders must develop greater transparency into the costs, utilization and operations of their IT services in order to optimize their IT investments and evolve from being technology managers to being stewards of business technology.”" -- Barbara Gomolski, Research Vice President, Gartner ""By making these costs transparent, the IT organization can fundamentally  change the way business units consume IT resources, drive down total enterprise IT costs, and focus on IT spending that delivers real business value. The CIO who leads this change can usher in a new era of strategic IT management--and true partnership with the business."" —Andrew M. Appel, Neeru Arora, and Raymond Zenkich. McKinsey & Company. " "Companies can get an understanding of the best candidates for virtualization or consolidation, for instance, and further reduce the cost of resources. IT organizations consistently try to become more efficient, and this type of detailed information enables visibility, billing and chargeback in the future ," -- IT Cost Breakdown. The average IT budget has the following breakdown: This is confirmed by independent research from McKinsey and the Sand-Hill Group. In addition to the considerations above about the current volume of software asset costs, even more important is their growth – their absolute growth (in EUR) and relative growth (relative to growth of other costs in the IT budget). Software asset costs are growing, endogenously and exogenously: