As the name implies, the nondiscretionary heading includes contracted fees and expenses. Core services are defined as same-level services -- "operation and maintenance in the strictest sense," Jacobs says. The initiatives/ service enhancements heading, he says, is "where things are going, what we chose to fund, where we have a certain amount of discretion on this vs. that."

The budget breaks down like this: 35 percent to nondiscretionary, 57 percent to core lights-on, day-to-day operations, and 8 percent to enhancements and initiatives.

Those percentages may not be fun to work with, but at least Mitre knows where it stands, and that's the first step toward managing costs better. Many IT leaders don't have a good handle on maintenance because they don't have an accurate count of their IT assets and the cost of running each part, says Murphy.

Kaiser Permanente is decidedly not one of them. Michael Blake, vice president and CFO at Kaiser Permanente Information Technology in Oakland, Calif., has worked for the past two years to assess and analyze the health care provider's IT assets, including 5,600 professionals and an annual operating budget that exceeds US$1 billion. "We try to understand different applications, projects and services," he says.

The result is a lot more detail on how much the various parts of his large and complex organization cost. For example, IT has more than 1,700 applications, projects and services, Blake says, and it uses time reporting and a chargeback mechanism to keep tabs on costs, as well as who and what are driving them. "I call it transparency," he says.