🚀 go-pugleaf

Brian,

> On Tue, 19 Apr 1994, Sam Fairchild wrote:
>
> > My personal opinion is you should Keep It Seriously Simple.
> > The KISS Rule reigns when you have to come back and maintain what
> > you built.
> > Of course, the method you choose depends on your orgaization's
> > objectives:  income, regulation, behavior modification, etc.
> > The simplest way I know is to charge by the Megabyte.
> > Your objective will determine whether the chargeable Megabyte is
> > measured as static storage use (like a daily/weekly snapshot of your
> > DASD file population ) or  as throughput in Megabytes transferred
> > to/from DASD spaces or both.
> > If you are interested in behavior modification (of users), then you
> > really should make that chargeable unit visible to your customers,
> > so they have the opportunity to see what they did, measure it
> > themselves, and possibly un-do what they did.
> > Enjoy!
> > Sam Fairchild
> > Senior Customer Services Specialist
> > Academic Computing Services
> > The Ohio State University
> > =========================
> >
>
> Sam,
>
> the problem with using megabytes is that users are unlikely to understand
> what they are being billed for -- after all, how many users know what an
> EXCP is ?
>
> Brian Risman brisman@io.org
> Bank of Montreal
> Toronto Ontario Canadad

That is a good point!  My academic background must be showing!  :-)
I guess my experience is with a lot of
"power users" who purchase their own PC or MAC or SUN workstation
where both computer memory and disk space are measured and discussed
using the "megabyte" term.
These persons I deal with use a mainframe as a compute server or
as a file server on the network.
You are right in that the average person on the street might not be
familiar with the term.
We had charged for usage in recent history for "computer dollars"
which took four pages of formulas and a one hour class to explain
to persons with enough patience (usually auditors :).
We stopped that in favor of centralized funding and freed six staff
to pursue the growth areas demanded of our department.
Sam
===
P.S. When I worked for Banc One, they had some kind of chargeback
system for mainframe usage, but they seemed rather relaxed about it...