Open Access

Constanze Riedinger, Melanie Huber, Niculin Prinz, Christopher Rentrop

• Digitalization requires organizations to strategically invest in information technology (IT). As a result, the costs associated with IT in companies are rising and technological progress changes the setting for IT management. This poses challenges for IT managers to ensure spend-efficiency and manage IT costs transparently. However, no current literature review gives an overview of how IT cost management (ITCM) research dealt with past transformations. This paper aims to investigate ITCM concepts considering their historical context. It then derives implications for the digital age and identifies future research fields. The historical literature review reveals that ITCM research evolved with technological advances and the target to manage all IT-related costs and evaluate the impact of IT spend. However, the presented concepts lack consideration of current changes that hamper spend-efficiency and strategic decisions. Hence, this paper enables future research to address the identified research gaps. Additionally, practitioners gain awareness of how they can benefit from developed ITCM concepts.