1. Introduction
For organizations, it is often necessary to establish an information processing infrastructure that has the elements required to provide adequate, accurate and timely information in decision-making and to provide better service to customers.
The Client / Server model gathers the necessary characteristics to provide this infrastructure, regardless of the size and complexity of the operations of public or private organizations, and consequently plays an important role in the process of evolution of organizations.
IBM defines the Client / Server model as the technology that provides the end user with transparent access to applications, data, computing services or any other resource of the workgroup and / or, through the organization, on multiple platforms. The model supports a distributed environment in which the service requirements made by intelligent workstations or "clients" result in work done by other computers called servers.
Client / Server systems can be seen as follows, clients ask that a task be performed; The server performs this task and returns the information to the client through the network. Each component within these systems is exclusively responsible for performing its task.
The technological changes that have been taking place are so accelerated that the applications that companies may have are becoming obsolete. With this changing environment, organizations must adapt to new challenges and even go ahead and create this change themselves so as not to miss their business opportunities.
Flexibility to maneuver can be expressed in terms of scope and range, which in the case of scope is to visualize to whom information can be reached through the use of systems and the range of organization information that may be available is defined..
These changes that I mentioned previously, have caused the use of advanced technology to be more common, due to the reduction in the costs of the computer equipment, not so in the Client / Server systems.
2. Traditional Client / Server Cost Approaches
These traditional systems to obtain the cost of a Client / Server system are based on the functions of the entire system, in such a way that no real cost is obtained from the different activities that take place in a Client / Server system, such So this approach groups the different activities into functions and these are assigned this cost, therefore in most cases these functions turned out to be too expensive for organizations and they could not see the details of these costs.
Normally, there are 2 main reasons for why traditional approaches to costs do not facilitate the adequate quotation or cost of these systems.
• They host the costs by function instead of the activities that generate it.
• The costs incurred during the planning, design and prototyping that must be carried out are simply very expensive, which does not allow the organization to see the detail of these costs.
Within this traditional approach to the cost of Client / Server systems there are hidden costs of technology and some other non-technology costs that I will present below.
Hidden technology costs:
The skills that the employees of an organization have based on a system different from one that is Client / Server, will require that the personnel be trained to perform their new functions with this new system, which influences a high cost for the organization, of the same way if new personnel are required who have the skills to manage these types of systems.
Hidden non-technology costs:
Systems planning costs, this includes costs related to the administration of increasingly complex systems, as well as the necessary adaptations to the new needs of the organization.
Productivity loss costs, this includes the time it takes for staff to attend training sessions in the new system, which will take hours off work.
Costs of new development demands, this is the time that the programmers will take to develop more complex systems.
System maintenance costs, this involves looking for updates on the system and the effects of this new version.
Activity-based costs
The organization "Computer Aided Manufacturing - International (CAM-I)" defines this technique as a collection of information on operational and financial performance, mapping out the most significant activities of the organization for product costs.
The premises on which this technique is based is that the objective of an organization is to create certain exits, these exits have certain characteristics that cause certain activities and these activities cost money. This technique has been widely used for two reasons, the first is that the measurement of the costs of products and services is more appropriate and second that this technique helps to identify and control costs.
Steps to develop an activity-based cost system.
1. Conduct an activity analysis.
This activity describes the tasks, the time assigned to each task and the outputs that the processes must deliver.
2. Link costs to activities.
This activity includes all the production factors used to carry out an activity.
3. Identify drivers of cost.
This activity identifies the demand that each activity performs in the total cost of the project. Cooper and Kaplan make a difference in these cost drivers which are:
o Related to the unit: They say that a cost can be related to each activity based on a cause-effect relationship.
o Related to lots: They say that the costs common to different activities are difficult to identify
o Related to ease: The cost of an activity that is difficult to identify is arbitrarily accommodated in another activity.
3. Attribution of cost.
In this activity, a cost is developed for each unit of each activity, such as the cost of one employee per hour.
Applying activity based cost to a Client / Server system
Identify activities in the life cycle of a Client / Server system
First, the most important activities carried out throughout the life cycle must be identified. These activities can be seen in the systems development environment. The main ones are:
• Definition of the solution: Identification of the problem and determination of the problem (This is done through interviews). To carry out this definition correctly, the following steps are required:
o Document the existing system.
o Determine the needs of users
o Define the requirements in a functional way
o Determine if there is a technology that allows the company to meet its needs
• Solution development: Development of detailed prototypes of the new required flows and processes.
• Implementation of the solution: Training users, validating the data and implementing the changed processes and flows.
• Continuous improvement: Extend and refine the functionality of the application so that the user feels better using the system.
Conduct an analysis of Activities.
The main idea of this second step in activity-based cost is to identify the primary activities to be performed for the Client / Server system, which will provide a better understanding of how the costs of producing the Client / Server system are generated.
Link costs to activities.
Understanding the nature of the activities that are performed for the Client / Server system will result in a better understanding of the costs that each task generates for the realization of the system.
Identify drivers of cost.
Once the costs of the activities have been established, the drivers of these costs must be identified, the activity that each task represents in each of the elements of the organization must be identified and this represents a cost in the implementation of the system.
Attribution of costs.
Costs must be assigned to each of the activities that have been determined for the implementation of the system.
Complexity level settings.
The costs that have been previously described may not give all the information related to their real cost, since each of the activities has a different level of complexity, such that an activity that is more complex should have a higher assigned cost. to an activity with a lesser degree of complexity.
Performance monitoring.
This stage will identify the areas with a disproportionate cost, the reasons for this excessive cost, and establish responsibilities. The analysis of all the variations in the costs of each activity can be more expensive and time consuming and may not lead to any conclusions, so it is not recommended to carry out this type of analysis in such detail.
4. Conclusion.
Activity-based costs is a very useful tool that helps us to identify and assign costs to each of the tasks carried out in a project. This approach to costs will allow us to have greater control over the expenses that are carried out for the Achievement of a project so that we can more easily identify those activities that carry a significant burden of the total cost of the project and verify the validity of this information.
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