{"id":48,"date":"2005-06-01T00:22:11","date_gmt":"2005-06-01T06:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=48"},"modified":"2005-06-01T00:22:11","modified_gmt":"2005-06-01T06:22:11","slug":"whats_it_worth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=48","title":{"rendered":"What’s IT worth?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Becky Blalock, CIO of Southern Company, the big Atlanta-based electric utility, suffers no delusions of grandeur about her role. “This company is not in the IT business, so we’ll always be a stepchild here,” she tells Richard Pastore<\/a> of CIO Magazine. That no-nonsense attitude says a lot about Southern’s success in doing what many companies are afraid to do: charging IT costs back to individual business units. Blalock and her predecessor Tom Fanning have been fine-tuning their chargeback system for seven years, and the results, writes Pastore, “have been transformative.” IT costs have fallen substantially, while user satisfaction with the IT department has jumped to 4.6 on a scale of 1 to 5. Most important, business managers now have the precise cost data they need to make smart decisions about IT investments. And the company as a whole is in a position to make rational decisions about what to outsource and what to keep inside. This is a case study that any IT manager will find well worth reading – and maybe even emulating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many CIOs fear chargeback systems, but Southern Company is finding that letting business units see their real IT costs can pay big dividends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}