For a major multinational oil company, the managing director was concerned about the costs of computing which appeared to be continually increasing. At the same time, the information systems manager believed that the board were spending excessive effort monitoring a budget which did not reflect the true cost of computing and were indeed concentrating on items which were not within his control. Whilst the direct costs for computing development staff fell within his remit, a large proportion of the IT spend was devoted to processing costs for applications which were run directly by, and at the instigation of, the user community.

To this end, a study was instigated to ascertain the total cost of computing within the company. This study was conducted at a high level over a short period of time, as it was felt that a longer and more detailed exercise would give diminishing returns. The approach combined an investigation of the General Ledger, together with a series of structured interviews, carried out top down throughout the organisation. These interviews attempted to quantify the effort that user staff spent on computing, in any way other than was directly attributable to their work. Thus for instance, the time spent running applications, and using computers as a tool was considered part of the normal work load, whilst the time spent developing programmes or supporting a computing operation was included in the calculations.

The study showed that the total costs of computing, including external computing costs that were directly charged to users, the costs of the "shadow" computing groups discovered in the user community and group costs were more than double the IT budget.

As a result, the way that computing services were delivered to the organisation was evaluated and changed. Responsibility was devolved to User managers for their IT budget, in order that financial control could reside where the resources were spent and the costs of IT were now visible to the managers.