IT service cost tracking in ITSM: the missing link between IT service quality and business value

In a great act of corporate irony, IT services that are SLA-ed with great precision are almost always mysteries when it comes to understanding their cost. Most IT organizations can report the quality of a service against a multitude of metrics, and they can detail IT budgets along departmental or asset lines. However, the cost of providing a service as it is actually consumed by the organization is largely an unknown. This operational blind spot is the missing link in any reasonable discussion of IT service business value. After all, how can the business value of a service be determined without knowing what it costs to deliver that service?