While there are organisational ramifications, there are economic benefits that may offset some of the cost of reorganisation and retraining. In the case of the oil company, the approach allowed it to pool its resources and defer spending around £250,000 on a server upgrade that would otherwise have been required.

But as noted at the beginning of this article, the pooling of computers saw some less than happy chappies one morning. A couple of weeks in, there was some hostility between one group and another because some geologists came in early to use their computers and found that there were some other jobs still running," McAuley says.

"There are cultural issues that have to be tackled. We just got away with it, because it was for a four-week period. Were we to do it again we would pay more attention to the cultural issues. You need a better framework.

"The way forward is to set up an internal market where you get a service credit if your business unit is donating or supplying surplus computer services, and you pay more if you are using the service to make up for a shortfall. This avoids resentment building up - the same way you would feel about the annoying neighbour who is always popping around for a cup of sugar because they are too lazy to buy their own," McAulay says.

PA says utility computer users will have to adhere to a strict charging schedule linked to equally strict service level agreements. Consumers of the services will need to be fully supported (and that support may have to come from in-house staff, and third parties). Finally, there will be a need for an accurate real-time billing model.

These are non-trivial issues that must be fully addressed before utility computing can fly.

Share and Share Alike

Beyond the opportunity to establish internal computer markets, McAulay foresees corporations in similar industries sharing computer resources along utility lines. "The notion that BP and Shell share resources is not absurd. There is no reason why they couldn't, as they already do to some extent when they employ the same oil services companies to acquire the raw data."

Competition law notwithstanding of course. If sectoral giants combined computing power at the expense of other competitors, there might be sufficient grounds for a trade practices action. In any case, according to McAulay, this may not be where the biggest competitive advantage lies. "The other thing is that utility computing provides the opportunity to do different things with IT," he says.

"IT can prove a brake to doing certain things because companies don't have the luxury of computer time 'on-demand'. Companies can't experiment so easily when they need large amounts of computer power that they don't have." McAulay says small and medium enterprises particularly would benefit from being able to purchase from a utility computing provider large chunks of on-demand time and storage to perform experiments or conduct occasional mathematical modelling for decision support. "When the frameworks become better this will be possible," he says.

And McAulay is adamant that utility computing will not diminish the CIO role. "The logical driver for all of this is the CIO because there is an element of education until the penny drops," he says. "Then, when you have access to utility computing, the CIO role will become that of a facilitator - showing business what it can now do, that it couldn't do before."