For as long as I have worked here, the technology budget sat in one place: mine. Every licence, every mailbox, every test environment and every mobile handset was funded centrally, which meant that to the rest of the organisation all of it was free at the point of asking, and the only cost anybody experienced was the wait.
The consequences of that were entirely predictable and took me too long to see. Nobody has ever asked me for the cheaper licence. Requests for the top tier arrived with justifications that never mentioned money, because there was no reason they should. Test environments were created and never decommissioned, since the cost of an idle one landed on a line that department had never seen. And I was routinely in the position of refusing requests on cost grounds while holding the only copy of the figures, which makes the refusal look like obstruction rather than arithmetic.
We introduced showback last year rather than chargeback, which mattered. No money changes hands and no internal invoices are raised. Each department simply receives a monthly statement of what its technology consumption cost the organisation, in plain categories, with the previous months alongside for comparison.
The first statements produced a great deal of discussion and roughly three hundred returned premium licences within six weeks. One director discovered that his department was paying for a specialist analytics product used by two people, one of whom had left. Non-production environments fell by about half once somebody other than me could see them listed. A team that had insisted on a dedicated environment for a quarterly process moved to a shared one within days of seeing the annual figure.
There was a perverse effect and we had to correct for it. A department declined a security tool because the line would show against them, which is an unacceptable thing for a reporting mechanism to cause. Security, network, identity and backup are now funded centrally and shown as an overhead, because I am not prepared to let a departmental budget decide whether the organisation is defended.
Consumption is down about fourteen percent and the arguments have changed shape completely. They are now between a department and its own priorities, which is where they always belonged, and I am no longer the only adult in the room who can see the price list.
– Serguey Shinder
