IT Overheads in State Organisational Units

Abstract

Abstract The issue of cost management within State Organisational Units (SOU) is still left to the subjective decisions of managers who nevertheless usually do not have a sufficient scope to adopt effective decisions. The reason is a constant effort of political representation to set new rules for the exercise of competence and financial and cost management within SOU. The result of these, often unprofessional, interventions is a fundamental over-regulation of the whole segment of SOU cost management. One of the possible ways is to introduce modern management methods based on the causation of activities and costs in SOU, notably including the ABC/ABM methodology. A specific cost domain represents overhead expenditure on IT. With this respect there stands a general assumption that IT leads to boosted efficiency of activities, which fact may also mean a displacement of labour force. The performed regression analysis revealed that IT overheads are not dependent upon the number of workers. These overheads are subject primarily to technical and technological development. As a result, neither number of workers nor any indicators derived from it, such as full time equivalent, can be used for the construction of cost drivers for causal cost allocation methodology according to the ABC/ABM methodology.