Using ITIL processes as cost center in accounting and budget

[Eire]

Hi,

Is there anyone with thoughts about the possibility to use each process as cost centers to use in accounting and budgeting work within a matrix organization?

The requirement for this will be that all resources (staff, aso.) will be allocated to a process.

So the idea will be that the budget for a process could be like below:

Incident Management

Saleries: $1500 000
Office rent: $2500 000
Service Agreements: $20 000
...

Problem Management

Saleries: $1200 000
Office rent: $2000 000
Service Agreements: $30 000
Hardware investments: $15 000
...


a.s.o

Is this possible or even suitable? And is it anyone with experience of allocate staff working within processes (totally replace the ICT process with Service Support and Service Delivery processes).

I guess the question is kind of philosophical, but it is of great interest for me if anyone have real experience of such approach.

/Cheers,

Patrick

[itilimp]

I don't have real world experience with this but I suspect it comes down to how large your organisation is.

In ours there is no way this would work because we all do a bit of everything. So you'd end up billing x% of someone's salary based on time spent working within one process, x% amount to another etc. Far more hassle than it is actually worth.

Where you have huge numbers of staff who only work on one process, this may work - though I remain doubtful personally.

What is it you would be hoping to achieve by taking this approach?

[matrejekm]

I don't have real experience with accounting, but maybe better way is to make it by Services not processess?

You hire different sets of processes to deliver each service.

[itilimp]

I'd imagine that your end users are more interested in how much they are paying for services.

How you calculate what goes into that service charge is a whole other ball game

[matrejekm]

After thinking a while I think neither processes nor services wouldn't be a good choice for Cost Centres.

Costs and budgets based on such division will be very flexible. It is really hard to say what is the cost of Incident Management. Easier is to connect costs to teams.

We use cost models of our services to count how much they cost. But it is anly use for offering - not budgeting or accounting.