At least around here, it's common for a department to have a number ofdifferent administrative groups inside of it, all of them providingservices (whether internal or external). Generally this produces aprofusion of group websites, partly because each group has differentneeds and partly so that no single group is stuck with the job of beingresponsible for a web server that contains everything, includingpeculiar applications that they don't understand and can't touch.

It's recently struck me that one of the

One of the things that is popular in universities and companies ischarging for internal services. The hope is that this will causepeople to be 'efficient' in both what services they use and how theyprovide services, much as if the various groups were real companiesdoing business with each other. However, this is an illusion.

One of the ways that this is an illusion is that a university cannotlet a consumer group fail if it cannot pay its bills or doesn't haveany money, the way a