IT Success!: Towards a New Model for Information Technology

7.2. Ownership of IT costs for the regulation of supply and demand

While there are various ways of regulating supply, ranging from improving resource productivity to smoothing out demand over the year, it is ultimately tinkering at the edges – at the end of the day, you regulate supply by increasing your resource capacity, period. So when it comes to supply and demand, the main requirement is to regulate demand, and that is what we will focus on.

Given the discussions up to now on the free lunch syndrome and the lack of an adequate pricing model to help regulate demand in IT, it should come as no surprise that the business clients should bear all of the above cost categories associated with producing and running an application. As we saw in Chapter 2, it forces the client to carry out a real cost–benefit analysis 'with teeth', i.e. one with the decision-making power not just to approve a project but also to withhold or cancel its funding if it is not living up to expectations.