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IT Cost Modeling & Chargeback

A full technology budget allocated across every agency by measured consumption rather than negotiation — designed in 2012, first implemented in 2013, owned for eleven budget cycles.

Also known as CBM, Chargeback, Cost Allocation, Service Catalog

Left to right is time. Each row is one of the 11 disciplines this one worked alongside, ordered so kindred disciplines sit next to each other rather than alphabetically — a landscape only means anything if neighboring rows belong together. Height is the work running in that domain in that year, weighted by what failure would have cost — life-safety ×3, a statutory obligation ×2.2, the estate itself ×1.5, an evaluation ×1. Every project declares which of those it was, so each ridge traces to an entry you can open and disagree with. Only the work that used this technology is counted, so what shows here is the company it kept rather than the record around it. Height and color are on the record-wide scale rather than this page’s own, so a modest estate draws a modest landscape and any two of these pages can be read against each other.

Architected the CBM, the City of Jacksonville’s IT cost and billing model, and owned it for eleven budget cycles — design begun in early 2012, first implementation in 2013, running to 2024: the full technology budget, operating and capital, allocated across every agency by measured consumption rather than negotiation.

Built on a service catalog of roughly sixteen hundred costed line items across applications, infrastructure, desktop and support, rolled into cost pools and distributed on explicit allocation bases — network ports in use, authorized positions, virtual and physical servers, remote sites, service desk tickets, mobile devices and subscriber radios.

The model was benchmarked before it was designed: more than twenty-five cities and counties interviewed on how they recovered technology cost, narrowed to the Seattle and Tacoma models as the closest fit. The problem with the inherited model was not arithmetic — too much cost sat in pools allocated by PC count, which gave agencies no visibility and no lever, and made the bill hard to defend when someone pushed back.

Technology refresh was built into the rate rather than the capital cycle: every billable item carried a sustainability charge directed to a dedicated refresh fund, so replacement was funded continuously by the people consuming the service instead of argued for after equipment had already aged out.

Every agency’s charges and underlying asset detail were published to a customer-facing portal. Transparency was not a reporting feature bolted on at the end — it was the mechanism that made a bill nobody could compel anybody to pay actually get paid.

Applied in

  • Architecture Review BoardFrom November 2021The successor governance body, and the first with a budget attached — a five-to-ten year capital plan rather than a rolling list of purchases.
  • CBM Cost Model and Customer Billing System2012–2024A full technology budget allocated across every agency by measured consumption rather than negotiation — designed in 2012, first implemented in 2013, owned for eleven budget cycles.
  • Citywide Network Total Cost of Ownership Study2023–2024A weighted scoring instrument for a manufacturer standard ahead of a refresh — which earned itself within three weeks, when a reseller's savings claim turned out to be priced against the wrong baseline.
  • Enterprise Asset and Work Management Platform2009–2024Fifteen years and two titles on a platform carrying several lines of business and two outside agencies — stood up as a governed project, fed from the systems that knew the truth, and split in the chargeback model.
  • Enterprise Technology Budget Program2011–2024A $48M to $62M annual technology budget, built and defended in public across thirteen cycles for a consolidated city-county government.
  • Citrix Published Application Estate2005–2023Eighteen years, five platform generations and roughly 4,000 billed seats — with a per-seat price an agency could argue with.
  • Oracle ERP Program — RFP to Cloud Go-Live2011–2023Twelve years from the 2011 request for proposal to a 2020 cloud go-live — the cost model that had to exist first, and a cutover instrumented so neither side could blame the other.
  • The Capital Project Evaluation MatrixMethod authored March 2008 · the quadrant workbook created 18 March 2009 · last recorded use 17 May 2023The weighted scoring instrument behind the City's technology capital funding — and the single workbook built in March 2009 that was still deciding a security product purchase fourteen years later.
  • The Virtual Desktop Position2011–2023A decade of evaluation whose deliverable was a refusal — two platforms piloted and closed by change order, and an objection that held for eight years.
  • FLGISA Cost Model Program2012–2021Taking the City of Jacksonville's IT cost modeling, chargeback and allocation approach to peer jurisdictions across multiple conference years.
  • Enterprise Business Intelligence Platform and Capability2012–2016Architecture authority over the City's analytics platform, held deliberately apart from the group that built the reports — with the capability hired and taught to a published standard.
  • Automated Asset Tracking Program2007–2016Nine years carrying the asset tracking agenda across two titles, argued on billing accuracy rather than loss prevention — and ending in a position and a scoped proof of concept rather than a deployment.

Career

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See also

Also searched as

  • FinOps
  • technology business management
  • TBM
  • showback
  • unit economics
  • cloud cost management

A full technology budget allocated by measured consumption at published unit rates — the discipline before the framework and the acronym.