Xref: utzoo news.sysadmin:2312 comp.misc:5859 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ukma!rutgers!att!cbnewsh!wcs From: wcs@cbnewsh.ATT.COM (Bill Stewart 201-949-0705 ho95c.att.com!wcs) Newsgroups: news.sysadmin,comp.misc Subject: Re: computer charge back Message-ID: <274@cbnewsh.ATT.COM> Date: 25 Apr 89 21:51:15 GMT References: <885@hawkmoon.MN.ORG> <1989Apr16.020150.1083@utzoo.uucp> <16570@oberon.USC.EDU> <1989Apr18.004953.10427@utzoo.uucp> <1674@ccnysci.UUCP> Reply-To: wcs@cbnewsh.ATT.COM (Bill Stewart 201-949-0705 ho95c.att.com!wcs) Organization: Your typical phone company involved in your typical daydream Lines: 85 In article <1674@ccnysci.UUCP> dan@ccnysci.UUCP (Dan Schlitt) writes: } The first thing that you must decide is what you want to accomplish by } this accounting. I thought that the original question was directed } toward recovery of costs. That is a reasonable goal. } A second kind of thing that you may want to do with charges is to } allocate (scarce) resources. This is also a reasonable goal. ***YES***! This is critical, because even in organizations with funny-money budgets, there's often never enough. Your objectives for an accounting system in a business are often radically different from your objectives in a university. For instance, in a university, you typically want to encourage students to log off, because terminals are (typically) a scarce resource - you're trying to minimize the cost of providing adequate services to support education, and make sure the people who need services most can get and afford them. But in a business, you want to maximize profits, which you do by maximizing the productivity of the workers subject to the limitations of your equipment. For instance, you want to encourage people to stay "connected", so that when they have mail they know right away, rather than when they wonder if they might have mail - so you shouldn't charge for connect time unless you have a serious resource shortage. (In these days of networking, you *shouldn't* have a port shortage!) Besides, what does "connect time" mean in a client-server environment - if I want to use a central DBMS, I should be doing remote execution / RPC queries instead of logging on and telling my workstation to pretend it's an antique 3270! Don't let your accounting system lock you into old technology! (On the other hand, don't let your accounting system make you always discard the old technology for new stuff - there's enough of that tendency anyhow.) Similarly, in both environments, you probably don't want to charge people for CPU time on their workstations - not only does it let them use CPU-intensive user interfaces which (hopefully) will increase their productivity, it lets you offload work from the central servers. (Workstation CPU power is essentially a sunk-cost resource, while central servers are much more like variable costs.) Depending on the incremental costs to you, you may want to juggle the cost ratios between workstations and central resources to encourage one or the other - it's probably more cost-effective to do large-volume printing on central printers than on everybody's laserwriter, but small print jobs should probably be handled locally. With disk drives, you may want to charge a lot to use central servers, but on the other hand you should be provided easily-accessed archives of useful stuff like "comp.sources.*" so people don't all keep their own copies, and archive services should be cheap and well-supported because you want people to move stuff to tape instead of leaving it on the disk. If you have *any* control over this at all, set the prices so people will buy large-enough local disks. Disclaimer: I can say all this stuff with no biases whatsoever, because I've mostly retired from administration and gone back to engineering, so I know that providing free services to users is the ideal :-) The last time I had to deal with cost-allocation from the administrator's side, the managers of the two main projects on the machines decided who had more money which month, and I juggled CPU vs. connect time charges to divide up the 100% fixed cost however they wanted, while the users did their best to get the job done with a 1 MIPS VAX and a Cray-sized appetite. Because it was a friendly-manager environment, we were able to manage the accounting in a way that didn't interfere with our work, and the lab was small enough that we could do scarce-resource-allocation by talking with the users when we needed extra cooperation. In a standard comp-center environment, we oculdn't have done the same job - Mario really *needed* 200 MB of disk (back when that was a big number), and he really did need 90% CPU for a couple of days per week, and any normal cost-accounting procedure would have amortized the VAX in a month. -- # Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs 2G218 Holmdel NJ 201-949-0705 ho95c.att.com!wcs # also found at 201-271-4712 tarpon.att.com!wcs