[michaelt]

It all depends on the structure of the organisation, and how well managed it is.

Imagine an organisation where developers are adding features to the service, where each new feature uses $1000 of disk space and enables $10,000 of new sales.

And imagine the sysadmins buy huge file servers, each new file server costs $500,000

In a highly bureaucratic organisation, the sysadmins will cross-charge the developers for disk space, and they'll already have the money ready when a new file server is needed.

In a well run and less bureaucratic organisation, the bosses will realise that $500,000 bill enables projects that will return $5M, so they'll gladly pay it.

In a poorly run organisation, the bosses will blanch at the $500,000 bill because it's expensive and not linked to a project; the sysadmins will ask the next person who needs $1000 of disk space to pay $500,000 for it (they'll refuse); then the sysadmins end up having to refuse requests and cajole developers into only keeping 3 days of logs instead of 7 to free up disk space. Before you know it, the bosses are hearing bad feedback about the sysadmins...

[lstamour]

… and somebody gets the bright idea to replace the sysadmins with “managed cloud” and S3 file storage, leaving the sticker price as a “digital transformation” cost until they can work out the cross-org billing using an app someone built in their spare time to read itemized bills and re-bill internal budget numbers for their fair share of resources?

[Spoom]

To complete the story here, the app doesn't work because dependencies have changed in the meantime, so everything is tracked on multiple giant spreadsheets.

[WorldMaker]

That internal budgeting app isn't a top priority because it isn't user facing. The company has enough interns in accounting with Excel experience and one of them knows macros and Access (or PowerApps, or for some horrifying reason, VB6). Of course their math is wrong and they don't know anything about the software they are budgeting across departments and it still just defaults to just bucketing everything as "unclassifiable overhead" rather than revenue departments, but now its in an Excel macro spaghetti ball black box so it is less obvious, and by the time scale up gets out of hand for Excel/Access/PowerApps/VB6 and programmers are actually forced to be assigned to look at the spaghetti ball, because the business might finally collapse at that scale, all of the C-Suite are so used to seeing the reports and the numbers the way they are and programmers aren't as smart as accountants when money is involved and should recreate the system exactly as it was rather than implement improvements, such as say domain expertise of software projects and their revenue models.

Not that I've bitterly seen multiple versions of that in my career or anything, this is still just purely hypothetical complaints department, eh?