Service-Oriented Cost Allocation for Business Intelligence and Analytics: Helping Service Consumers to Increase Business Value

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, the authors 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 increases customer understanding and cost awareness. Based on this approach, the authors introduce a BI&A value creation cycle which helps customers to use BI&A services cost-effectively.