Here’s a head scratcher for you: What does it mean when tech company revenues continue to grow year over year and the leading objective for CIO’s and CTO’s continues to be to reduce IT costs? If the three macro components of an IT budget are capital, opex, and people, where do you think companies are achieving cost savings, if they are achieving cost savings at all? There are a lot of internal accounting monkeyshines that go on in order to demonstrate cost savings to management. But at the end of the day are IT costs less? I don’t believe so. Companies bury IT costs in the strangest places such as the cost of sales might include a dedicated IT team to support just the sales force. A branch office may hire a local IT contractor to maintain their systems without telling HQ and write it off as facilities maintenance. Goofy stuff but from the point of view of the end users it makes perfect sense. Can a centralized IT organization truly provide the services required by a large, distributed organization? Or, should there be a federation of IT organizations within a company with a central organization playing a coordination role, identifying commonalities and integration points that shave the sharp corners of the overall cost of IT within a company? The reason I’m posing questions is that I’m not sure and am grappling with this macro question on a couple of fronts.