If You Build It, Will They Come Back?
The model at the center
Building a cost model is usually the straightforward part. The more difficult questions are whether people will continue to use it, whether it can survive a change in staff, and whether its construction strengthens the practitioner’s credibility over time. In any technology cost or technology value program, the cost model sits at the center as the mechanism by which dollars are aligned to measures of utilization or consumption that grow by an order of magnitude as you move from the smallest input, the dollar, to the largest output, the way technology adds value to the business.
The choices that shape construction
There are more ways to build a cost model than there are tools available to support its creation, maintenance, and scalability. There are even more approaches to configuring one, and still more decisions to be made about how to approach the technical complexity of its construction.
Some of the decisions are easily recognizable and well understood:
Which data sources to use
What tooling options fit the use case and the budget
Which peers and partners to include in the design discussions
Other decisions are more opaque, and a commonly questioned one is how closely a modeling approach should align with a tool’s feature list, a vendor’s use case library, what everyone else is doing, or what Joe in marketing’s neighbor suggested because he took a class one time.
The answer to this one is that a cost model should reflect the operational patterns of the business closely as possible. In working toward that goal, gaps and challenges will surface. Addressing those challenges creates the feedback loops through which the accuracy and reliability of the cost model improves over time.
Defensibility and sustainability
Considerations that don’t surface as often but are paramount to the value conversation are related to defensibility and sustainability. Specifically:
Can the model be explained to and comprehended by people without proximity to its construction?
Can the way it works be represented in ways that allow people to see their work or the work of their domain within the model?
Can the ongoing operation of the model withstand a restructuring or change in person responsible for it?
Defensibility impacts trust, adoption, and operationalization. Sustainability impacts the same dimensions, because the business can’t rely on something that can’t be trusted to remain stable over time.
What transferability means in practice
What this means for practitioners is that we should consider whether the cost models we construct are transferable. Another practitioner with similar knowledge, skills, and exposure should be able to view a cost model and reasonably comprehend what’s happening.
What often goes unspoken is that how a cost model is constructed becomes part of its credibility story. A model that’s constantly rebuilt, re‑explained, or re‑interpreted begins to look less like an operational instrument and more like an unstable experiment. When that happens, the people associated with it inherit the same perception. The model becomes “their thing,” rather than the organization’s thing, and its usefulness narrows to the span of their tenure.
A cost model that’s built with clear logic, visible structure, and defensible choices can survive staff changes, reorganizations, and shifts in strategic direction. It can be picked up by another practitioner and understood without a full archaeological dig through past decisions. It can be operated by someone new without fear that a single misstep will collapse the entire construct.
Sustainability, in this sense, is about whether the model can continue to be believed, not just whether it can run. A model that withstands turnover, absorbs new hands, and remains coherent over time signals to the business that cost transparency isn’t a personality-driven effort. It’s a durable capability.
