David Coyle from Gartner spoke, and then led a panel discussion, about "Running IT Like a Business."
IT is no longer a monopoly. Business people are pretty smart at IT nowadays. IT must compete and maintain its position as a trusted advisor. The business can make their own decisions, such as purchasing an account with salesforce.com.
At the same time, Gartner's poll shows that CIOs' #2 goal for 2009 is to reduce the cost of IT. This is hard because IT gets pressure to reduce costs at the same time that the business wants IT to make expensive exceptions.
IT shops can be placed on a maturity model according to how well they can manage themselves:
- Survival
- Awareness
- Committed
- Proactive
- Service-Aligned
- Business Partnership
When trying to assign costs to a service, consider hard dollar costs, soft costs, aggregated component costs, and on-going cyclical costs. You may need a "finance executive" position to help with the accounting part of cost assignment.
When considering chargeback, consider simplicity, fairness, predictability, and controlability. You could use "show-back" (notional charging) instead of actual chargeback--the important part is knowing how much your services cost.
Employ service level reviews to give yourself a chance to talk with customers when you're doing something right.
IT cannot create value--but the business can receive value. This reminds me of the sales concept that "people want to buy, they don't want to be sold."
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