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

Current issue in corporate waqf in Malaysia

Corporate waqf is still new for the contemporary Islamic studies in Malaysia. There are limited resources and guidance to explain about corporate waqf. The purposes of this study are to explore the issues, concept and development of corporate waqf. Current structure for corporate waqf also being explored as part of case studies. This paper provides several perspectives and suggestions to this issue. The methodology for this study is secondary data approach by using the data analysis from the related journal and paper. The subject for this study is Selangor Muamalat. This paper come out with the concept and development of the contemporary waqf focused on corporate waqf and there are five current issues identified in the contemporary waqf. Next, seven proposed action plans are suggested to cover the issues. Lastly, the structure of Selangor Muamalat is analyses by focusing on the management structure, financial and operational framework and the Shariah consideration towards Selangor Muamalat structure

Co-Regulated Consensus of Cyber-Physical Resources in Multi-Agent Unmanned Aircraft Systems

Intelligent utilization of resources and improved mission performance in an autonomous agent require consideration of cyber and physical resources. The allocation of these resources becomes more complex when the system expands from one agent to multiple agents, and the control shifts from centralized to decentralized. Consensus is a distributed algorithm that lets multiple agents agree on a shared value, but typically does not leverage mobility. We propose a coupled consensus control strategy that co-regulates computation, communication frequency, and connectivity of the agents to achieve faster convergence times at lower communication rates and computational costs. In this strategy, agents move towards a common location to increase connectivity. Simultaneously, the communication frequency is increased when the shared state error between an agent and its connected neighbors is high. When the shared state converges (i.e., consensus is reached), the agents withdraw to the initial positions and the communication frequency is decreased. Convergence properties of our algorithm are demonstrated under the proposed co-regulated control algorithm. We evaluated the proposed approach through a new set of cyber-physical, multi-agent metrics and demonstrated our approach in a simulation of unmanned aircraft systems measuring temperatures at multiple sites. The results demonstrate that, compared with fixed-rate and event-triggered consensus algorithms, our co-regulation scheme can achieve improved performance with fewer resources, while maintaining high reactivity to changes in the environment and system

On the Benefit of Virtualization: Strategies for Flexible Server Allocation

Virtualization technology facilitates a dynamic, demand-driven allocation and migration of servers. This paper studies how the flexibility offered by network virtualization can be used to improve Quality-of-Service parameters such as latency, while taking into account allocation costs. A generic use case is considered where both the overall demand issued for a certain service (for example, an SAP application in the cloud, or a gaming application) as well as the origins of the requests change over time (e.g., due to time zone effects or due to user mobility), and we present online and optimal offline strategies to compute the number and location of the servers implementing this service. These algorithms also allow us to study the fundamental benefits of dynamic resource allocation compared to static systems. Our simulation results confirm our expectations that the gain of flexible server allocation is particularly high in scenarios with moderate dynamics

20th century publications on cost accounting by Spanish authors previous to the Standardization Act (1900-1978)

This paper aims to describe and explain the beginning and evolution of cost accounting in Spain through the examination of accounting texts. In this evolution, three periods are distinguished: the late 19th century, the first half of the 20th century, and 1951-1978. In 1978, the official standardization of Spanish cost accounting occurred. Cost accounting first appeared in Spanish texts at the start of the 20th century. However, in 19th century accounting treatises can be found references to some aspects of cost accounting to which the paper refers. The traditional orientation of authors in the second period clearly reflects a monistic recording pattern, i.e., that cost accounting in combination with general accounting forms a homogeneous whole, with full-cost allocation on the basis of historical costs. The small differences found among these authors relate to a large extent to the fixed-costs allocation. This period corresponds to the introduction into Spain of the Central European school of accounting thought represented by Pedersen, Schmalenbach, Palle Hansen, and, above all, by Schneider. This influence intensified from 1951 onward. In the second half of the 20th century, German thought shared influence with American thought represented in the works of Kester, Horngren, Lang, Lawrence, Neuner, etc. The French Accounting Plan (General Chart of Accounts), published in 1957, also had an obvious influence on Spanish accounting scholars of this time. This influence is clearly shown in the Spanish standardization of cost accounting published in 1978 as part of the first Plan General de Contabilidad (General Accounting Plan) passed in 1973

Energy-aware dynamic pricing model for cloud environments

Energy consumption is a critical operational cost for Cloud providers. However, as commercial providers typically use fixed pricing schemes that are oblivious about the energy costs of running virtual machines, clients are not charged according to their actual energy impact. Some works have proposed energy-aware cost models that are able to capture each client’s real energy usage. However, those models cannot be naturally used for pricing Cloud services, as the energy cost is calculated after the termination of the service, and it depends on decisions taken by the provider, such as the actual placement of the client’s virtual machines. For those reasons, a client cannot estimate in advance how much it will pay. This paper presents a pricing model for virtualized Cloud providers that dynamically derives the energy costs per allocation unit and per work unit for each time period. They account for the energy costs of the provider’s static and dynamic energy consumption by sharing out them according to the virtual resource allocation and the real resource usage of running virtual machines for the corresponding time period. Newly arrived clients during that period can use these costs as a baseline to calculate their expenses in advance as a function of the number of requested allocation and work units. Our results show that providers can get comparable revenue to traditional pricing schemes, while offering to the clients more proportional prices than fixed-price models.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Financial analysis of a partial manufacturing plant consolidation

Includes bibliographical references

The Shapley value for airport and irrigation games

In this paper cost sharing problems are considered. We focus on problems given by rooted trees, we call these problems cost-tree problems, and on the induced transferable utility cooperative games, called irrigation games. A formal notion of irrigation games is introduced, and the characterization of the class of these games is provided. The well-known class of airport games Littlechild and Thompson (1977) is a subclass of irrigation games. The Shapley value Shapley (1953) is probably the most popular solution concept for transferable utility cooperative games. Dubey (1982) and Moulin and Shenker (1992) show respectively, that Shapley's Shapley (1953) and Young (1985)'s axiomatizations of the Shapley value are valid on the class of airport games. In this paper we show that Dubey (1982)'s and Moulin and Shenker (1992)'s results can be proved by applying Shapley (1953)'s and Young (1985)'s proofs, that is those results are direct consequences of Shapley (1953)'s and Young (1985)'s results. Furthermore, we extend Dubey (1982)'s and Moulin and Shenker (1992)'s results to the class of irrigation games, that is we provide two characterizations of the Shapley value for cost sharing problems given by rooted trees. We also note that for irrigation games the Shapley value is always stable, that is it is always in the core Gillies (1959)

Trade & Cap: A Customer-Managed, Market-Based System for Trading Bandwidth Allowances at a Shared Link

We propose Trade & Cap (T&C), an economics-inspired mechanism that incentivizes users to voluntarily coordinate their consumption of the bandwidth of a shared resource (e.g., a DSLAM link) so as to converge on what they perceive to be an equitable allocation, while ensuring efficient resource utilization. Under T&C, rather than acting as an arbiter, an Internet Service Provider (ISP) acts as an enforcer of what the community of rational users sharing the resource decides is a fair allocation of that resource. Our T&C mechanism proceeds in two phases. In the first, software agents acting on behalf of users engage in a strategic trading game in which each user agent selfishly chooses bandwidth slots to reserve in support of primary, interactive network usage activities. In the second phase, each user is allowed to acquire additional bandwidth slots in support of presumed open-ended need for fluid bandwidth, catering to secondary applications. The acquisition of this fluid bandwidth is subject to the remaining "buying power" of each user and by prevalent "market prices" – both of which are determined by the results of the trading phase and a desirable aggregate cap on link utilization. We present analytical results that establish the underpinnings of our T&C mechanism, including game-theoretic results pertaining to the trading phase, and pricing of fluid bandwidth allocation pertaining to the capping phase. Using real network traces, we present extensive experimental results that demonstrate the benefits of our scheme, which we also show to be practical by highlighting the salient features of an efficient implementation architecture.National Science Foundation (CCF-0820138, CSR-0720604, EFRI-0735974, CNS-0524477, and CNS-0520166); Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana and COLCIENCIAS–Instituto Colombiano para el Desarrollo de la Ciencia y la Tecnología “Francisco Jose ́ de Caldas”