If you read any TBM book or attend a conference, you’ll drown in business speak. It’s not that they are incorrect. It’s that they are trying to fill a hundred pages or twenty minutes trying to get down to the essence. At the end of the day, it’s all about driving behavior.
Transparency is nice. By its self, it does nothing. Metrics are great, same for benchmarking. But you’re only doing those things to achieve a result in your organization. Trying to highlight server cost? That’s fine, but why? If I’m going to take the time to put an organization on a transparency system, I want to have a goal.
Goals are good for the org and great for your career. Goals can be measured. If you tell the CIO that your goal for the end of the year is to provide transparency, how is that measurable? There’s always one luddite in the org that will happily ignore the effort. If you change that goal to “I will lower infrastructure side costs by 3%”, you’ve laid down the gauntlet. The org now has something tangible they expect to bank at the end of the year.
You now have a mandate. You now have urgency.
Now your efforts can be about highlighting the portions of infrastructure costs that can be impacted. You can take it a step further and breakdown the costs by how quickly they can be shed. You can take that data to the application owners and get buy-in. You can explain the vision and the metric you can use to monitor progress. Think of it as “Transparency +”That’s a hell of a lot better than “transparency”. They both start the same but one drives behavior and the other is merely an FYI.
FYIs don’t drive cost save and definitely don’t put money in your pocket at the end of the year via bonus.