Dollars and Sense: What Your IT Services Really Cost

Higher education IT leaders are increasingly asked to demonstrate value, justify investments, and guide institutional strategy—but many lack a clear understanding of what their services actually cost to deliver. Traditional approaches relying on ticket counts, timesheets, or overly complex models often fail to produce actionable insight. This session presents a pragmatic, scalable approach to service costing that leverages existing data sources—finance, HR, procurement, and service catalogs—to estimate the true cost of delivering enterprise IT services such as email, networking, and learning management systems. Without introducing burdensome tracking mechanisms, institutions can achieve sufficient precision to support executive decision-making. Participants will learn how to define services and products to avoid double counting, map staff effort without timesheets, and align costs with institutional strategy. The session will also explore how service costing enables meaningful conversations with senior leadership, supports sourcing decisions, and elevates ITSM as a strategic partner. Whether you are just beginning or refining your approach, this session will provide practical techniques, lessons learned, and a roadmap for getting started immediately.