🚀 go-pugleaf

On Thu, 21 Apr 1994, Sam Fairchild wrote:

> 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...
>

Hi Sam,

now you have ME thinking ! <grin>

We have been a mainframe shop for a long time, but like others are
moving towards client-server slowly but surely.

Accordingly, given your client-server view, could you expand further
on how you do your computer billing and charging philosophy ?

This is new territory for me !

Thanks,

Brian Risman
brisman@io.org
Bank of Montreal
Toronto Ontario CANADA