I was reading an article in Information Week recently about theBP transformation of their internal IT department over the last few years. It's mainly a CIO-type article, but still interesting to read about the scale of changes for an IT group that had a $3billion budget. Yes, that's "B" as in billion.
Inside the article, there was one very interesting idea that I found presented. In trying to reign in costs and create a little more accountability for costs, the technology group initially presented bills to business groups of what each service cost that business. It wasn't a chargeback scheme, but more of a transparency move that was there to make the business units aware of what their services cost.
The next year, the idea was that each business would be presented a series of options that they could choose from for different services, some lower cost than others. And presumably the lower cost would mean lower levels of service, availability, bandwidth, etc.
That's a very interesting idea. What if we as developers or database people had a way to present different options to business people in more clear cut terms. If you want clustering, it will cost $xx, but mirroring is perhaps (.60 * $xx). Or even that a TPS rate of yyy costs $zz less than a higher rate. Or perhaps more interesting, that doing a basic report costs 2 hours, but adding in fancy layout and user adjustable graphs might raise the time to 3 days.
I've often thought that business people want everything, but don't often realize the cost differences. They aren't always material costs, but often they are time costs, which can delay one project for another. Showing a more transparent "bill" to business people, and allowing them to better direct the services they need, might result in more efficient use of the resources.
I don't know I'd want to do this for every service or project, as some span departments or large sections of the company, but I could see some value here for small projects that often crop up. That's assuming that we can somehow prevent managers from just asking for more hours from salaried IT people when their time budget runs out.
Steve Jones
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