Today I heard it again, that age old statement that is haunting many IT organizations that I meet with: they simply don't have enough IT resource to meet the business expectations. Of course when I speak to the business I hear the complaints that IT is too slow, too cumbersome, not nimble. In short both parties are not happy resulting in significant trust issues between the business and IT. In the end, this has driven the business to obtain IT enabled business services directly from suppliers completely bypassing IT.

To solve this issue, we must understand the root of the problem. 

Based on my personal research to date, fundamentally IT needs to manage its own business effectively and efficiently demonstrate value back to the business to regain trust. To do this, one of the first requirements, is to provide financial insight back to the business. Providing financial insight is a foundational component to ensuring that IT effectively manages the business of IT and also can communicate costs for services back to the business.

To deliver financial visibility to the business requires an understanding of consumption by the business. To do this, IT needs to create a system of record to automatically calculate consumption in financial terms and collect operational metrics on physical, virtual or cloud service usage and apply it across the business.

One of the analogies I often use is this: If you go for a burger, the store is going to charge you, so you will base your decision on a balance of price and hunger. The same should hold true for IT. IT-enabled business services are not free. The business should use the cost to assist in its choice of service and use the cost of delivery as a mechanism to determine what is delivered in-house and what is procured through service providers.

Now I am hungry. Off for a burger.