Oh, do I remember these days. I spent 17 years at a global multi-national telecom through two mergers and a bankruptcy (and a half). We were a large organizat

Oh, do I remember these days. I spent 17 years at a global multi-national telecom through two mergers and a bankruptcy (and a half). We were a large organization (between 5,500 and 22,000 depending on the year). During much of that time, "who paid for what" was a big issue. The thread alludes to the issue: IT says "you need to buy new hardware every X years", department already has less than no budget, has no budget for new PCs and perceives no need for new PCs for workers that could get away with much less than they're using, now. It was a funny little game that was played because IT would get dinged in their compliance metrics if staff was out of date (and staff hated old hardware/blamed IT), but management would get dinged for spending too much and have little incentive to buy new hardware until the last second. Meanwhile, C-Level executives on both sides get to say "your problem". The difference, here, is that someone gave IT a pretty large sledge-hammer and permission to use it in order to force departments to push for more budget. In our case (and I'm sure others), a bit (a lot?) of non-compliance was normal. Personally, I think the take that "IT should own the budget" isn't as great as it sounds. It solves one problem: distributing the payment among budgets creates a "shared responsibility" that ultimately becomes "pass the buck". It also happens low enough from C-Levels that "they don't have to think about it." Having IT own the budget solves this because at least one C-Level is going to have to account for a large enough expense that it's likely to be a little better planned for. It won't always be better planned for ... depending on the company or manager, it won't often be better planned for. Unfortunately, the consequence of this poor planning only extends to the IT budget. Since compliance is non-negotiable, the largest line-item on the budget -- IT's staff -- is the next hit. In the former model, "making the budget deficit up" is naturally spread throughout the company, in this model, it all hits IT.