10 Lessons from Finance for Commercial Sharing of IT Resources

Sharing IT resources within and between organizations has an attractive value proposition in terms of efficiency and flexibility, but despite this commercial practice is limited. In contrast, financial and commodity markets have proved very successful at dynamic allocation of different resource types to many different organizations. Thus to understand how the potential benefits of sharing IT resources may be promoted in practice we analyze enabling factors in successful markets. We present 10 basic lessons for IT resource sharing derived from a financial perspective and modified by considering the nature and context of IT resources. From each lesson we derive the required software or process capability required to support it. We then evaluate the maturity of the respective capabilities within the Peer to Peer (P2P) and Grid environments using a simple framework based on the standard Capability Maturity Model (CMM) approach. We conclude with a description of the largest capability gaps and the lowest hanging fruit for making IT resource sharing a viable business proposition in many organizations.