IT Cost Modelling & Chargeback

Architected the CBM, the City of Jacksonville’s IT cost and billing model, and owned it for eleven budget cycles: the full technology budget, operating and capital, allocated across every agency by measured consumption rather than negotiation.

Built on a service catalogue 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, authorised 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.