Sid Adelman's Answer: Chargebacks are always a problem, and they can result in behavior that is detrimental to the organization. Whatever you propose, you will rarely find people who are happy with their bill.
You could charge for how much data they place in the data warehouse. This works if only one department is using that data, but you could bill the primary data owner. You could bill by the number of queries and reports created but this doesn't address the differences in complexity of the queries and reports. You could bill by CPU usage and disk access but this assumes you have a not-too-expensive means of capturing that information.
Sid Adelman is a principal in Sid Adelman & Associates, an organization specializing in planning and implementing data warehouses, in data warehouse and BI assessments, and in establishing effective data architectures and strategies. He is a regular speaker at DW conferences. Adelman chairs the "Ask the Experts" column on www.dmreview.com. He is a frequent contributor to journals that focus on data warehousing. He co-authored Data Warehouse Project Management and is the principal author on Impossible Data Warehouse Situations with Solutions from the Experts and Data Strategy. He can be reached at (818) 783-9634 or visit his Web site at www.sidadelman.com.
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