Service Management Business Model Terms

Question 1

IT as a Service

Answer 1

A competitive business model where an IT organization packages up all of its business-facing offerings as consumable services. These services are packaged and promoted in terms easily understood by the business and in a manner that makes them easy to consume.

Under this model, IT views the BUs as having many options for most IT services and the IT organization has to compete against those other options in order to be the chosen provider. Options for providers other than the internal IT organization may include outsourcing companies and public cloud providers.

Question 2

Showback

Answer 2

Consists of providing IT management, departments, and corporate management with an analysis of the IT costs attributable to each BU, without actually cross-charging those costs. Same as chargeback except the invoices are never paid.

Question 3

Chargeback

Answer 3

Mechanism by which a requesting BU gets an internal bill (or “cross-charge”) for the costs that are directly associated to the infrastructure, data transfer, application licenses, training, etc., which they generate. Charges may also include overhead.