Cost Driver Based Internal IT Cost Allocation: A Case of a Medium-Sized Austrian Financial Service Provider

IT has a high share of the total costs at information processing companies. Though not only minimal IT costs are relevant, but also effective use of IT from the long term business perspective. Decisions on IT investments are made based on information about costs and benefits commonly provided by controlling in-struments. To identify direct and indirect costs of IT services, an internal IT cost allocation (IT activity allocation or IT chargeback) is being used by the vast ma-jority of companies, especially in IT-related industries. The allocation of shared IT infrastructures and overhead costs to IT services, as well as of IT services to service recipients, is based on simplified allocation keys. Allocation keys are commonly built use-based, per revenue share or per employee. For example allo-cation per CPU or RAM for servers and per Gigabyte of disk space for central storage systems is commonly being used. Nowadays those rarely are relevant cost drivers, except for extreme increases in usage intensity, which raise jump-fixed costs to a higher level. As a consequence service recipients lack the possi-bility and incentive to control the real costs and to optimize the cost/benefit ratio. Furthermore allocated costs, especially for shared services, do not represent cor-rectly the real cost situation and product pricing and business cases based on those costs are not accurate. As a constraint information cost to gain data to build allocation keys have be reasonable. The question is, how to build allocation keys as accurate as possible to apportion ‘real’ IT costs with reasonable effort. The pa-per at hand describes the internal IT cost allocation and its allocation keys based on main actual cost drivers by means of a case study at a typical medium-sized Austrian financial service provider. This approach yields a more accurate alloca-tion of actual IT costs

Understanding IS Success Model and Valence Framework in Sellers’ Acceptance of Cross-border E-commerce

Cross-border e-commerce becomes more and more popular and general. The foci of researches in e-commerce have moved from domestic towards to global market. Yet, most of extant literatures are from buyer’s perspective, whereas sellers are also important in the success of cross-border e-commerce. In this study, we are aiming to identify the elements of the success of cross-border e-commerce and the relationship with trust and intention to use from seller’s perspective. To do so, we apply a mixed method to accomplish this research. We have identified the key factors which sellers are concerned about, and why they engage in cross-border e-commerce. In addition, we have developed new dimensions with associated items for system quality, service quality, perceived benefit and perceived cost in the context of cross-border e-commerce. The theoretical contributions and practical contributions have been discussed lastly

Cancer Informatics for Cancer Centers (CI4CC): Building a Community Focused on Sharing Ideas and Best Practices to Improve Cancer Care and Patient Outcomes.

Cancer Informatics for Cancer Centers (CI4CC) is a grassroots, nonprofit 501c3 organization intended to provide a focused national forum for engagement of senior cancer informatics leaders, primarily aimed at academic cancer centers anywhere in the world but with a special emphasis on the 70 National Cancer Institute-funded cancer centers. Although each of the participating cancer centers is structured differently, and leaders' titles vary, we know firsthand there are similarities in both the issues we face and the solutions we achieve. As a consortium, we have initiated a dedicated listserv, an open-initiatives program, and targeted biannual face-to-face meetings. These meetings are a place to review our priorities and initiatives, providing a forum for discussion of the strategic and pragmatic issues we, as informatics leaders, individually face at our respective institutions and cancer centers. Here we provide a brief history of the CI4CC organization and meeting highlights from the latest CI4CC meeting that took place in Napa, California from October 14-16, 2019. The focus of this meeting was "intersections between informatics, data science, and population science." We conclude with a discussion on "hot topics" on the horizon for cancer informatics

Improved Visualization of Networked Storage Metrics

This project\u27s goal was to create visualizations for EMC which resolve problems with complexity in the field of networked storage management. These visualizations were aimed at representations of the network\u27s storage structure, visualizations the data through network, usage of space over time, and usage by a group/location. Each design was made distinct from the other designs, to demonstrate different methods of visualization. The team evaluated these designs with EMC employees, and was received well

The Missing Hyperlink — An Empirical Study: Can Canadian Laws Effectively Protect Consumers Purchasing Online?

Canadian consumer protection legislation applicable to online transactions generally works by a two-pronged method: first, private international law rules ensure that in most cases, consumers can sue in their home province under that province’s law; and, second, a wide range of substantive obligations are imposed on merchants, and failure to comply with these obligations provides consumers with a right of cancellation. This study considers the private international law rules applicable to online consumer contracts, and discusses the unique jurisdictional challenges presented by online transactions. This study also provides an overview of Canadian legislation applicable to online consumer transactions, and examines the provisions of the Internet Sales Contract Harmonization Template that were incorporated into the consumer protection legislation of several provinces. Given that there is little to no hard data on whether current consumer protection is actually effective in protecting consumers, an empirical study was designed to assess the limits of current legislation and offer recommendations to improve e-businesses and online consumers’ experience. The study’s main finding is that not a single business complied fully with its legal obligations. This suggests that in order for Canadian consumer protection law to have a significant impact on e-businesses’ practices, substantive obligations imposed by the legislation must be combined with a more effective coercive mechanism. State intervention is required to reshape legislation and ensure the protection of consumers’ basic rights

A Decision Support System for Moving Workloads to Public Clouds

The current economic environment is compellingCxOs to look for better IT resource utilization in order to get morevalue from their IT investments and reuse existing infrastructureto support growing business demands. How to get more from less?How to reuse the resources? How to minimize the Total Cost ofOwnership (TCO) of underlying IT infrastructure and data centeroperation cost? How to improve Return On Investment (ROI) toremain profitable and transform the IT cost center into a profitcenter? All of these questions are now being considered in light ofemerging ‘Public Cloud Computing’ services. Cloud Computingis a model for enabling resource allocation to dynamic businessworkloads in a real time manner from a pool of free resourcesin a cost effective manner. Providing resource on demand atcost effective pricing is not the only criteria when determiningif a business service workload can be moved to a public cloud.So what else must CxOs consider before they migrate to publiccloud environments? There is a need to validate the businessapplications and workloads in terms of technical portability andbusiness requirements/compliance so that they can be deployedinto a public cloud without considerable customization. Thisvalidation is not a simple task.In this paper, we will discuss an approach and the analytictooling which will help CxOs and their teams to automate theprocess of identifying business workloads that should move toa public cloud environment, as well as understanding its costbenefits. Using this approach, an organization can identify themost suitable business service workloads which could be movedto a public cloud environment from a private data center withoutre-architecting the applications or changing their business logic.This approach helps automate the classification and categorizationof workloads into various categories. For example, BusinessCritical (BC) and Non-business Critical (NBC) workloads canbe identified based on the role of business services within theoverall business function. The approach helps in the assessmentof public cloud providers on the basis of features and constraints.This approach provides consideration for industry complianceand the price model for hosting workloads on a pay-per-usebasis. Finally, the inbuilt analytics in the tool find the ‘best-fit’cloud provider for hosting the business service workload. ‘Bestfit’is based on analysis and outcomes of the previously mentionedsteps.Today, the industry follows a manual time consumingprocess for workload identification, workload classification andcloud provider assessment to find the best-fit for business serviceworkload hosting. The suggested automated approach enables anorganization to reduce cost and time when deciding to move toa public cloud environment. The proposed automated approachaccelerates the entire process of leveraging cloud benefits,through an effective, informed, fact-based decision process

ACUTA Journal of Telecommunications in Higher Education

In This Issue Please, Sir, May I Have Some More? Using Technology to Spread the Word Deja vu: Unified Communications Attention Shifts to Cloud Telephony TAMU Works from Home Electronic Textbooks: A New Wave Approaches lnstitutional Excellence Award Interviews President\u27s Message From the Executive Director Q&A from the CI