All known TCO-Models (TCO, RCO, TEI, etc) must be separated by their given input aspects and the approach of its specific calculation algorithms to do Total Cost of Ownership. Missing Standards to get TCO-figures make it very hard to compare different models or configurations.

Goals of TCO-Tool

• Introduction of well defined TCO-Objects (Group, Service, Costdriver, Personal- and Factcosts) to allow transparent modelling of any kind of infrastructure as generic tree (which makes the TCO-Tool far more flexible than a 2 dimensional Excel-sheet!).
• Complete assignment of all costs - which are direct (generally cover the visible and support-related investments and expenses) and indirect costs (less visible and usually are dispersed across the business operations organizations ) - during the lifecycle (usage duration) of TCO-Objects.
• Focus and aid to separate Fact- and Personalcosts.
• Introduction of business codes such as cost cause (for e.g. Maintenance).
• Separation between accountancy and TCO-approaches (usage, depreciation, repeatable costs).
• Well defined calculation formulas and algorithms to evaluate and compare models.
• Dependency and cost sharing of TCO-Objects (useful for common costs such as buildings or networks which must be split among business fields).
• Graphical and table representation by a wide range of reports.
• Set a TCO-Standard one day may be?

Experienced difficulties doing TCO

• You need economical, accountance and technical know how to analyse a given infrastructure (for a.g. the influence of a server on its related clients must be understood).
• TCO is not accountance or bookings. Time periods are different and have other rules (1 Monitor can be depreciated within 3 years though it may be used 5 years at least). Also the salary in bookings is a different factor than e performed TCO-effort (like education).
• Personal resources are often hardly split into single tasks (non-productive time etc).
• The benefit of a thing is NOT PART OF A TCO-model.
• TCO-figures are kept secretly by companies. It is hard to get good figures to compare sometimes. Open studies should be verified (who is the sponsor behind the scenes?).
• Comparing two completely different variants (such as Inhouse- vice Outsourcing-solution) needs a lot of reflection from the very beginning.