A Bill of IT for the uninitiated, is product and services structure which clearly explains the cost of all IT related services and devices in a way that is easily understood by business users.
At SeeClear™ we extend the term to a bill of ICT (Information Communication Technologies).
What is a bill of ICT?
According to Wikipedia a bill of IT is an exhaustive list of IT assets and services owned by a company.1 More accurately, a bill of ICT is a clear but detailed list that explicitly shows the associations between ICT asset and services with any or all of the following:
It’s cost– the monthly cost or fix price per service or asset
The price – the price of each service/asset multiply by the quantity of service/asset (predefined fixed cost)
The budgeted cost– full cost per year or other reporting period.
The activities– key usage metrics, bandwidth use, roaming, voice and data, out-of-bundle charges
Benchmarking– how is the service use in comparison to other users or groups or the entire organisation.
Within the bill of ICT, there are two policies that can be used by IT Departments and Managers in all industry sectors and companies: IT Chargeback and IT Showback of which both are easily done within a (I)TEM2 environment.
What is ICT Chargeback?
ICT Chargeback is an accounting strategy that applies the costs of Telecom and IT services to the business unit in which they are used. This system contrasts with traditional IT accounting models in which a centralised department bears all of the IT costs in an organisation and those costs are treated simply as corporate overhead.
This concept could also be seen as “responsibility accounting” as this demonstrates which departments or individuals are responsible for significant expenses. It is intended to move the responsibility to the departments or users and encourage them to treat Telecom and IT services as any other utility (like electricity and water) they use moderately.
What is ICT Showback?
Maybe you find that ICT chargeback is a bit extreme for your organisation and thus we present the ICT Showback principle.
In and around 2010, the concept op ICT Showback appeared to keep the advantages of Chargeback without the extreme measures that the latter entails. Showback consists of providing IT management, departments and decision-makers with an analysis of the ICT costs incurred by each department or user, without actually cross-charging those costs.3
The pressure on the departments to limit their usage is less direct, however awareness of the costs usually results in department heads and senior management to question why a department is “spending” more than another on ICT.
How do we implement a bill of ICT?
Your organisation can implement a bill of ICT by using an agnostic TEM SaaS solution that has the ability to integrate into vendors using third party gateways. This enables IT managers to:
Transition the operations and administration of mobile fleet to one reporting system.
Send invoices (Inter-departmental billing/allocation).
Centralise the management of all assets in one system.
Provide access to the centralised repository for all business unit managers to create a culture of Cost Transparency.
Give employees data on their technology consumption.
Chargeback costs to the business units.
Manage your technology providers in one Integrated Eco-system.
Empower the entire organisation to manage the enterprise digital footprint.
Use Actionable Data Analytics
How do I get a bill of ICT?
Hopefully, I have cleared the concept of a bill of ICT. The question is: wouldn’t it be great if there were a platform that quickly, painlessly and simply generates a bill of ICT? The good news is that the platform exists! It is Intelligible™.
Intelligible™ is a web-based Technology Expense Management platform that provides incomparable visibility, analytics and control across your Telecom and IT (ICT) Landscape.
Intelligible™ is an IT and telecom expense management tool that keeps track of all IT and telecom expenses in a company, and one dashboard rules them all. It takes the simplicity of the bill of IT and makes it even more elegant for end users; justifying your ICT investments will never be more straightforward. Contact us to find out more!
References:
Cheang, Henry. “What is a Bill of IT and Why is it Important?”
(Information Technology)/Telecom Expense Management.
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IT_chargeback_and_showback)