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Lauren Balik's avatar

As with Data Contracts and many aspects of the Data Mesh, this model is already in place in many upmarket, larger teams. It's called "IT Chargebacks" which turns the IT/Data team into a mini business within the broader business.

https://journal.uptimeinstitute.com/it-chargeback-drives-efficiency/

It's used for headcount charging (if marketing wants 10 hours of an analyst time, they'll pay the Head of Data for 10 billable hours), computing resources (if marketing takes up 80% of the Snowflake bill, they cover that, at least in part), licenses (marketing has 50 Looker users so marketing pays IT for 50 Looker seats), and for external product and services vendor RFPs to baseline against.

This is very common in 1000+ headcount companies that run on EBITDA and net operating profit incentives over growth-first incentives.

For further info on how to crawl, walk, run toward this, and as chargeback and showback 101, you can read the following:

1) https://www.finops.org/framework/capabilities/chargeback/

2) https://www.softwareone.com/en-us/blog/all-articles/2022/06/20/how-to-establish-a-finops-culture-of-accountability

3) https://www.nicus.com/blog/showback-vs-chargeback-which-should-drive-your-bill-of-it/

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Andrew Padilla's avatar

Chargebacks, at least how they were structured at IBM when I was there (i.e. Blue Dollars) had the unfortunate consequence of limiting innovation for potential new products that might otherwise have added a dependency on other offerings. There was no room for experimentation unless an immediate derivative value could be determined. Granted these were sofware products and not data(sets?) and I think you are referring to charging for data professional's time/outputs internally and not necessarily datasets directly, I think there presents a scenario where only work of immediate utility get performed and as a result no incubating projects that could move the needle long term ever get funded. Maybe a good thing maybe not dunno.

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