Over the past few months I have attended several IT conferences including CA World in Las Vegas. One of the themes that continues to come up is the increased demand on IT from the business. The business wants more and they want it faster than ever before. I'm always interested in how organizations deal with that demand and more importantly influence that demand. Many IT organizations are charged with simultaneously reducing costs while adding more value - a monumentally difficult task. The IT teams that do this well almost always do some form of chargeback or showback.

It's important to first talk about behavior and how it ultimately will help you drive the right demands on IT. Think about Apple's iTunes Music Store or the App Store. Apple set the standard price for songs and applications at $0.99. This price point is so low from a financial standpoint, that it basically eliminates cost from the decision to make the purchase. If I pay $0.99 for an app that stinks, there really isn't a cost penalty for that, and therefore I spend little time reviewing apps before I buy them. I recently bought a $20 app for my iPad, but I only executed the purchase after weeks of reading reviews and sleepless nights (and my wife still thinks that's too much to spend on an app). It amazed me that because this app was 20x the normal price that it required 20x the internal debate for me to push the purchase button. If I walked into a Babbage's or an Egghead store 15 years ago I would never have spent so much time debating a $20 piece of software when the rest of the titles on the shelf were $20-$100.

If we take this example of driving behavior in your organization, you ultimately want to drive the same behavior but by inversing the situation. Make it a financial decision for the business. Make the business unit managers well aware that the business services and the level of support and maintenance they receive are not free and instead probably expensive. Enterprise IT is NOT a $0.99 app! Could they deal with "less service" at a lower price point? Even if they aren't writing IT a check, showing them the costs that affect the entire company's bottom line is critical. All managers should see themselves as an owner of the business and ensure they are paying for the right level of service their department needs. You cannot influence demand without financial transparency and showing service based costs back to the business is the critical first step. As you mature with showback you could influence demand by pricing non-standard services higher than their costs to discourage use and push more users to the standard services. How can you influence demand to manage costs better while giving the business want they need?