An Empirical Analysis of Information Technology Operations Cost

When outsourcing IT (Information Technology) operations, it is important to estimate operations cost accurately. To help IT operations cost estimation, we analyzed cross-organization data which includes 73 IT operation cases collected from Japanese companies/organizations. Operations cost is roughly decided by the number of operations staff and unit cost of staff. So we clarified attributes which have relationships to the number of staff or unit cost of staff to help analogous estimating of them. The result showed that the number of computer terminals and network range are major factors of the number of staff. Also, the number of UNIX server and process standardization are major factors of unit of staff. In addition, we tried to build estimation models for the number of staff and total cost of operations. The number of staff estimation model is used when IT operations service providers estimate operations cost, and the operations cost estimation model is assumed to be used by IT operations service purchasers. In the experiment, the number of staff estimation model showed moderate accuracy, but the total operations cost estimation model showed low accuracy.