A colleagues mother at work was being overcharged for Electricity bills for the period of the last year, with the reason for this being that the electricity company was reading the wrong meter! This got me thinking, how many people have this certain electricity company overcharged over the same period or even since they started as a business? I expect a large volume of people have been ripped off with the net result of revenue being accrued into the service providers coffers.

With those negative views withstanding now align this overcharge scenario within todays era of Utility computing and billing within the IT Sector. Unless you are exceptionally efficient as an IT unit and have invested in toolset and technology to have a personal “IT Meter” you most certainly are going to be being overcharged I expect.

My point with this is that is the Utility computing world that is used for IT Managed Service agreements going to be as granular and utility driven as the bill you are receiving actually states? Are you sure you are really obtaining the true beneficial value that is offered by a utility billing agreement? Or in the grand scheme of things is your organisation more appropriately suited to an alternative way to pay for IT Services? Strong control and operational management reporting are most certainly needed to provide data that can facilitate your commercial teams to ensure you are not being overcharged and losing the potential benefits of a utility offering.

Additionally look at this overcharging scenario for a cloud based world and this potential overcharge in future will be magnified even further. Despite the same obvious traits in the Cloud world of ensuring that you are still paying for what you actually use I believe that this new wave of computing era will bring yet even more true characteristic that we see within home based billing.

Now, I do not want a plethora of Spam and followers on Twitter trying to sell me chargeback/measurement tools, I am merely stating that what you believe you are paying for within day to day usage utility service may or may not always be what you actually think when it comes to utility and this is evident by what I discovered happened with utility services for the home that have most likely been over charging consumers after 40-50 years since meters (or the wrong meters) were installed into millions of homes.