A Practitioner’s Introduction to Job Order Costing (JOC)
If Activity‑Based Costing explains why cost happens, Job Order Costing shows us exactly how it accumulates to the work we do every day. By following cost from resources to activities and into individual jobs, we start to see how requests, deployments, and even model inferences carry different costs, and why that matters for real-world decision making in cloud, platforms, and AI.
The Lineage of Accounting Concepts Leading Up to AI Costing
Even though AI token costing feels new, parts of it resemble patterns we’ve worked with for years in Activity Based Costing and Job Order Costing. When we view tokens as units of work, the lineage becomes easier to see. This post offers that perspective as one way to ground the discussion and support the shared learning happening across the field.
Building ITFM and TBM Capability Through Fractional Leadership
As TBM practices mature, the real gap isn’t tools or reporting — it’s leadership. Fractional TBM leadership offers a way to guide the function while teaching internal teams how to sustain it, developing stronger leaders and more resilient practices along the way.
It’s Not the Framework
Frameworks don’t create cost transparency, organizations do. A framework is only as effective as your ability to implement it, align it to how your teams actually work, and sustain it over time.
Technology Cost Management Isn’t New
Technology cost management isn’t a new discipline. it’s the long‑standing practice of unit costing, allocation, and cost to value modeling applied to a new domain. Retail, manufacturing, logistics, and utilities have used these methods for decades. The difference now is that technology has become complex enough to need the same accuracy and precision.