Imagine your CTO comes to you and complains about the increasing costs associated with IT hardware, software, or cloud services.
And, as an IT manager, you are tasked to help bring the costs down. But how would you do that, especially when you don’t know which departments are behind the rising IT costs?
IT showback is a process or methodology that allows IT managers to track the usage of IT resources and their associated costs across departments. By identifying which department is using what resources and how much, you can always identify opportunities for cost optimization.
In this article, we dive deep into IT showback and its benefits and explain how it differs from IT chargeback. You’ll also learn about the common challenges IT managers come across during showback implementation with potential solutions.
Think of IT showback as a financial accounting system or mechanism that allows you to track the usage of various IT services and the associated costs for different departments.
Let’s understand IT showback with an example:
Consider a media company with multiple departments, including software development, marketing, accounting, and sales. Each department uses software, hardware, or cloud services daily.
Now, IT managers can see which departments use what IT resources and to what extent they use IT showback.
Let’s say you find that the marketing team uses too much cloud storage for their marketing assets. You can share the report with them and work together to optimize the use of storage by deleting unnecessary data. This can eventually help you reduce IT costs.
Note. While the departments know their IT usage in IT showback, they’re not asked to pay anything.