Traditional Technology Consumption
Traditionally, companies had a platform team who dreamed of getting some hardware to build their application so they went to procurement. Procurement reviewed their complex business case and if sufficient, gave them access to the money.
In this model…
- DevOps, or developers, are the requesters
- Finance are the gatekeepers, the approvers
- Spend is predictable and static, with known costs
- There are long procurement cycles
- The infrastructure purchased is usually intentionally oversized and not certain to be correct
- There is high risk of some level of failure at a high cost
To complicate things further, in a DevOps world, there are many teams working at once and technology requests are becoming more complex. Now, introduce the world of cloud and automation where procurement can’t keep up or is not needed to make purchases. This leads to companies where engineers with automation go directly to the money. Procurement and finance are losing control of the investment and the ability to track it over time. This means they cannot do their fiduciary duty to the company to control and correctly report on costs!
Cloud changes the dynamic…
- Engineers now have the power to spend company money with code
- Finance has less visibility into spend until after the fact and cannot do their fiduciary duty to the company
- Spend is dynamic and changes daily
- There is agile experimentation and some waste
- Overall, there is a lack of communication