According to a Meta Group Research 55% of all business managers are willing to pay more for IT Services in order to maintain availability of their critical business applications. But to be successfull one must be able to calculate costs. Otherwise one will be over run by competitors.
You must know and view IT-Services as secluded service catalogues one must be able to summarize IT-services in appropriate packages to attempt to derive direct and indirect costs.
1. Creating IT Service packages
Describe IT Services on offer
Define service packages and classes
Describe package contents
Set service standards
What is standard and what is extra?
Which important part do service design and customer needs play?
What must be dealt with when creating packages?
2. What does service cost?
Calculate costs on the basis of cost creators
Define IT Service key figures
Accessibility figures
IT infrstracture figures
Process figures
Find Service parameter
Structure Service classes (premium,…)
Differences in package agreements
Define quality indicators
Higher service quality influence costs
Recognice the creator-reaction process
Customer satisfaction is a quality indicator
Work out cost areas and types
Mark indirect and direct costs
Calculate costs for internal/external Workers
Costs for monitoring and reporting
What about marketing costs
Calculate “time” value
3. Work out a service billing structure
Differences between Cost transfer, Break-even and Profit calculation
General or direct cost transfer
Compair costs of GCT and CDT
Define criteria for billing services
Keep in mind following process factors:
Analisis of procedures and services
Identification main and side procedures
Screen cost boosters
Link packages to the cost factors
Calculate and bill for each package
Create billing systems for internal/external customers
4. Pricing of IT Services according to market prices
Identify market sectors and position your services
Find out maket services for IT Services
Use Benchmarks
How far can you go with your prices?
Look at different models for price calculation
How far could you go down with prices
Different price systems:
fix contract price
varied prices for big customers
step pricing (premium, gold,…)
Quality oriented pricing
Bonus systems
Keep to a few price strategies
View pro/contra of Low-Price and Low-Cost strategies
Adapt pricing if necessary
5. IT Service Score Card – Steering and cotrolling costs
There is a Total Cost of Service (TCS)
Measure service performance
Costs characters of SLA and service management
Transfer the service requirements into scorecard figures
Define a service portfolio for your IT-Services
Create a score card
Individual customer “Reality” figures
Importance of “Target” figures
Percentage of service fullfilment
Customer satisfaction
Quality of business relations