Paying the IT Piper.

• Position: Brief Article

An information technology network is a large, expensive, shared resource. And, according to Parker Silzer, president of Tribeca Software, users perceive it as free, so they aren't motivated to change their usage patterns. "Therefore there's a disconnect between consumption and cost," he notes. Now, though, Tribeca's NetCFO 2.0 lets organizations monitor use and charge departments back. Firms can "price, charge for a service based on its utilization," Silzer says.

At J.P. Morgan, for instance, "People started getting bills with numbers that had previously been invisible to them, and they were shocked," Silzer explains. "There were bills from departments people thought were shut down and servers they didn't...