Service-oriented Cost Allocation for Business Intelligence and Analytics: Who pays for BI&A?

Quantifying and designing the cost pool generated by Business Intelligence and Analytics (BI&A) would improve cost transparency and invoicing processes, allowing a fairer, more exact allocation of costs to service consumers. Yet there is still no method for determining BI&A costs to provide a base for allocation purposes. While literature describes several methods for BI&A cost estimation on an ROI or resource-consumption level, none of these methods considers an overall approach for BI&A. To tackle this problem, we propose a service-oriented cost allocation model which calculates BI&A applications based on defined services, enabling a cost transfer to service consumers. This new approach specifies steps towards deriving a usable pricing scheme for an entire BI&A service portfolio – both for allocation purposes as well as improving cost evaluation of BI&A projects. Moreover, it prevents BI&A departments from being considered as the sole cost driver, increasing customer understanding and cost awareness.