Chargeback is great as a means to reconcile business units’ IT and other costs with their revenue, but attempting to use it as a way to make IT pseudo profit center is a bad plan. Chargeback also only makes sense when a division has significant control over the cost (i.e. don’t bother to tie back costs that aren’t going to positively influence division behavior).

If (for instance) every employee is required to have an email license than it’s just silly to charge that back. But if employees get to chose between multiple laptop/desktop models with significant cost variation, then that makes sense to report at the manager/department/division level to drive frugal behavior.

However, even with this ‘client’ model, IT people should also remember that they are part of the business as a whole, and should be looking out for the overall needs of the business as well as the expressed needs of any particular project or division (including their own; don’t confuse your team with the business as a whole).

Employees acting as owners of the business is one of the good points of having employees rather than outsource contracts.