Managing cost performance of GI production at national survery and mapping agencies using activity based costing W.T. de Vries Geoinformatics management & infrastructure ITC P.O. Box 6 7500 AA Enschede Netherlands Email: devries@itc.nl Abstract National Mapping Agencies (NMA’s) all over the world are increasingly under pressure to operate more independently of government funds, sometimes to recover production cost, to work on a more commercial basis and sometimes even to privatize. This need was also verified and confirmed by a survey at NMA’s in developing countries. Activity based costing (ABC) is a concept that aims at highlighting the actual cost of business activities. These costs can in turn be used to verify non-value adding processes in an organization, and ultimately to help determine cost price, set performance measures of output, evaluate current and future prices, and plan for alternative business scenarios. ABC as a concept has been described in quite a lot of literature, sometimes praised as the ultimate solution, sometimes downgraded as just accounting tricks. In any case, it is assumed that every organization has its own characteristics resulting in a particular accounting system, as long as the system is set up in such a way that it can deal with a variety of scenarios and management decisions. ABC has proven to deal with this. The purpose of this paper is to verify how significant differences in cost calculations by ABC can be for typical NMA’s and cadastral offices. This is based on case studies, and on the analysis of the effects of certain business scenarios. The cost awareness in NMA’s requires not only a good understanding of the significant cost drivers in the organization, but also a realistic figure of how effective non-direct cost, such as indirect cost, support cost, administration, overhead, etc. is incorporated in the actual cost figures of business products. Typical for most NMA’s and cadastres is for example that the ICT cost are an increasingly important part of the total costs of the organization. ICT is however of variable importance throughout the organization. An evenly distribution of these cost would therefore not reflect the true distribution of the actual amount and differences in ICT services throughout the organization. A similar argument could be build up for administration and management costs. A change of business process as a result of technological development often implies also a change of how the process is managed. If this change of management is not reflected in the cost accounting procedures, the management information derived from this may not be accurate enough to take any business decision. It is therefore expected that incorporating ABC may effect the management of cost in NMA’s.