An expense is an item requiring an outflow of money, or any form of fortune in general, to another person or group as payment for an item, service, or other category of costs. For a tenant, rent is an expense. For students or parents, tuition is an expense. Buying food, clothing, furniture, or an automobile is often referred to as an expense. An expense is a cost that is "paid" or "remitted", usually in exchange for something of value. Something that seems to cost a great deal is "expensive". Something that seems to cost little is "inexpensive". "Expenses of the table" are expenses for dining, refreshments, a feast, etc.
Total cost of ownership (TCO) is a financial estimate intended to help buyers and owners determine the direct and indirect costs of a product or service. It is a management accounting concept that can be used in full cost accounting or even ecological economics where it includes social costs.
Information technology management or IT management is the discipline whereby all of the information technology resources of a firm are managed in accordance with its needs and priorities. Managing the responsibility within a company entails many of the basic management functions, like budgeting, staffing, change management, and organizing and controlling, along with other aspects that are unique to technology, like software design, network planning, tech support etc.
Information technology service management (ITSM) are the activities performed by an organization to design, build, deliver, operate and control information technology (IT) services offered to customers.
Capacity management's goal is to ensure that information technology resources are sufficient to meet upcoming business requirements cost-effectively. One common interpretation of capacity management is described in the ITIL framework. ITIL version 3 views capacity management as comprising three sub-processes: business capacity management, service capacity management, and component capacity management.
IT portfolio management is the application of systematic management to the investments, projects and activities of enterprise Information Technology (IT) departments. Examples of IT portfolios would be planned initiatives, projects, and ongoing IT services. The promise of IT portfolio management is the quantification of previously informal IT efforts, enabling measurement and objective evaluation of investment scenarios.
Open iT, Inc. is an independent software vendor that specializes in metering, analyzing, and optimizing usage of critical IT assets. It was founded in 1999 by Eistein Fosli, who obtained his Master of Science in Information Technology from the University of Oslo.
Performance engineering encompasses the techniques applied during a systems development life cycle to ensure the non-functional requirements for performance will be met. It may be alternatively referred to as systems performance engineering within systems engineering, and software performance engineering or application performance engineering within software engineering.
Software asset management (SAM) is a business practice that involves managing and optimizing the purchase, deployment, maintenance, utilization, and disposal of software applications within an organization. According to ITIL, SAM is defined as “…all of the infrastructure and processes necessary for the effective management, control, and protection of the software assets…throughout all stages of their lifecycle.” Fundamentally intended to be part of an organization's information technology business strategy, the goals of SAM are to reduce information technology (IT) costs and limit business and legal risk related to the ownership and use of software, while maximizing IT responsiveness and end-user productivity. SAM is particularly important for large corporations regarding redistribution of licenses and managing legal risks associated with software ownership and expiration. SAM technologies track license expiration, thus allowing the company to function ethically and within software compliance regulations. This can be important for both eliminating legal costs associated with license agreement violations and as part of a company's reputation management strategy. Both are important forms of risk management and are critical for large corporations' long-term business strategies.
Virtual machine lifecycle management is the class of management that looks at the life cycle of a virtual machine from the viewpoint of the application vs one focused on roles within an organization. A number of major software vendors, including Microsoft and Novell, have begun to release software products aiming at simplifying the administration of larger virtual machine deployments.
Enterprise IT management (EITM) is a strategy which details how organizations can transform the management of IT to maximize business value. As a strategy for increasing the business relevance of the IT function, EITM considers the need for IT organizations to start operating as a service-based business. That is, ensuring investments are prioritized according to business strategy and that operational efficiencies can be more quickly realized and costs reduced when IT processes are integrated and automated.
Information technology infrastructure is defined broadly as a set of information technology (IT) components that are the foundation of an IT service; typically physical components, but also various software and network components.
Lean IT is the extension of lean manufacturing and lean services principles to the development and management of information technology (IT) products and services. Its central concern, applied in the context of IT, is the elimination of waste, where waste is work that adds no value to a product or service.
A software license manager is a software management tool used by independent software vendors or by end-user organizations to control where and how software products are able to run. License managers protect software vendors from losses due to software piracy and enable end-user organizations to comply with software license agreements. License managers enable software vendors to offer a wide range of usage-centric software licensing models, such as product activation, trial licenses, subscription licenses, feature-based licenses, and floating licensing from the same software package they provide to all users.
IT chargeback and IT showback (memo-back) are two policies used by information technology (IT) departments to allocate and/or bill the costs associated with each department's or division's usage.
IT as a service (ITaaS) is an operational model where the information technology (IT) service provider delivers an information technology service to a business. The IT service provider can be an internal IT organization or an external IT services company. The recipients of ITaaS can be a line of business (LOB) organization within an enterprise or a small and medium business (SMB). The information technology is typically delivered as a managed service with a clear IT services catalog and pricing associated with each of the catalog items. At its core, ITaaS is a competitive business model where businesses have many options for IT services and the internal IT organization has to compete against those other external options in order to be the selected IT service provider to the business. Options for providers other than the internal IT organization may include IT outsourcing companies and public cloud providers.
The Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act made changes to the ways the U.S. federal government buys and manages computer technology. It became law as a part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015 (Title VIII, Subtitle D, H.R. 3979.
Technology Business Management Council is a Washington-based non-profit organization with the goal of creating and promoting “best practices for running IT as a business.” As of January 2018, the TBM Council has about 5,100 CIO, CTO, & CFO members who are advancing technology business management standards and education across all industries. Its current board of directors includes executives from AIG, Aflac, Apptio, Cisco, Dollar General, First American, Intuit, Great West Life, MasterCard, Micron, Nationwide, Red Ventures, Stanley Black & Decker, SunTrust, Tyson Foods, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Digital banking is part of the broader context for the move to online banking, where banking services are delivered over the internet. The shift from traditional to digital banking has been gradual, remains ongoing, and is constituted by differing degrees of banking service digitization. Digital banking involves high levels of process automation and web-based services and may include APIs enabling cross-institutional service composition to deliver banking products and provide transactions. It provides the ability for users to access financial data through desktop, mobile and ATM services.
Data center management is the collection of tasks performed by those responsible for managing ongoing operation of a data center. This includes Business service management and planning for the future.
