I have been thinking a bit about how a company might treat IT services as inventory. Thinking about investments in capital items, direct and indirect materials and labor to deliver some specific service with some finite capacity. The challenge is developing the proper quantitative measures by which the inventory can be managed. IT Services as inventory also allows for the application of many techniques to optimize and leverage the inventory. I’m sure that someone has done all this thinking already but it still interests me. I find most interesting the application of say LEAN to an IT Service inventory and the processes used to create the inventory. Ideas like, process yield variance, become very powerful and very intimidating to some participants in a traditional IT process. I have to dig around and talk to the Mr. Bieber, I’m sure he’s thought about it to.

More to think about.