TABLE OF CONTENTS Before I begin to set out my proposed best value practices I need to get out of the way an issue that underpins many of the practices I am about to discuss. That issue is transfer charging . As I said in the Introduction, this is a very emotive issue, with those who are strongly pro ranged against those who are strongly anti .
Those who are pro are typically so because they maintain that it is virtually impossible to develop a genuinely commercial mindset in the relationship between the business and the IT function (or, indeed, an ESP supplying IT services) without a commercial transaction taking place. Without this the business mindset is that IT is free and the central issue for the user of IT services is negotiating the biggest slice of the IT cake he can get (since someone else is paying for that slice). Note that when I state that the business mindset is that IT is free I am not talking about senior business management. They know only too well that IT is anything but free. But they are not the point of IT consumption (which is typically some considerable distance lower in the pecking order).
Those who are anti are typically so because they have seen the immense difficulty of successfully implementing a transfer charging regime .
For the pros it is an almost axiomatic assumption that to charge the business directly for IT services is inherently better than...
