So there I was, sitting in New York City a couple of weeks ago at The 451 Group's Uptime Institute Symposium, and spent a little time listening to Dean Nelson, the Sr. Director of eBay's Data Center services. He spoke about what eBay was doing with their new Salt Lake City data center and how it was paid for with their active cost savings initiatives. Sounds like the kind of data center we all dream about, and a management structure that understands long term winning strategy...

One of the most intriguing comments he made was regarding who pays the bill for power. Apparently, as soon as eBay moved the cost of power to the budget managed by the CIO, decisions were made in a much different manner. In fact, after the power bill was added to the CIO's bottom-line, he immediately ramped up it's efforts to reduce power consumption.  Surprising? Not really.

So the question bounced back to the top of my brain stack: Why don't we all just bite the bullet and add the power bill to the CIO's budget? Wouldn't that create the same catalyst for change that eBay saw? Wouldn't that shift efforts to reduce carbon, reduce cost, and become a Green corporate citizen into 5th gear everywhere? IT WOULD!!!!  Oh sure there are some logistic and measurement and data center monitoring issues, some economic G/L mechanics involved to implement the process, but for heaven's sake, we should encourage the proper behaviour, and stop hiding the problem. Hiding the budget as a 'burdened' cost, buried...

Frankly, it is very much like the Shell Game. Keep hiding the money so that know one knows where the money issue really belongs. Sure the CEO and CFO 'own' the power bills, but wouldn't it make sense to push the responsibility down a bit? To the teams that can actually DO SOMETHING CONSTRUCTIVE to lower these costs? Very few CIO's today pay (or are even aware of the detail for) the power bills for their data centers. My suggestion, follow eBay's lead and shift the G/L line items to the CIO and watch the rapid progress that will ensue...  (and when this higher level of interest takes hold, Modius will be there to help establish metric and measurement baselines by which to steer these cost improvements in very tangible ways!)