5 Top Tips To Succeed in Shared Infrastructure Environments

2. Introduce overhead and funding pools for capacity related growth 

One area of contention in developing a costing model for shared service environments is accounting for capacity related infrastructure, which cannot be directly recharged to business units.  

An example could be network and storage infrastructure components such as switches and frontend adapters, which provide a supporting role to rechargeable cost items such as switch ports and array disks.  

It simply doesn’t work if the IT department assigns these costs to operational budgets because they do not provide the granularity to cater for capacity requirements driven by demand.  

Instead, an overhead should be introduced for each rechargeable item that links its cost to the supporting elements of the infrastructure that require expansion when capacity thresholds are reached.

These costs should be broken down and fed into a pool of funds from which the components are procured as and when they are needed.

If the costing correlation between rechargeable items and their support components is accurately maintained, this pool will provide sufficient funds for non-rechargeable capacity related growth.

3. Capitalise operational tasks as rechargeable costs

Expenditure on ‘soft’ items such as training, support and maintenance is often overlooked in creating a service catalogue.  If these items are included in the recharging process, businesses can provide training for technology actually required by the business; support for hardware and software can be comprehensively assessed with third party vendors; and the ongoing maintenance of the entire infrastructure is subject to rigorous financial accounting.