All employees should be limited only by their ability rather than an absence of resources.

James Hamilton hid a pearl of wisdom inside Why Renewable Energy (Alone) Won't Full Solve the Problem that I think is well worth prying out:

I’ve long advocated the use of economic incentives to drive innovative uses of computing resources inside the company while preventing costs from spiraling out of control.  Most IT departments control costs by having computing resources in short supply and only buying more resources slowly and with considerable care. Effectively computing is a scarce resource so it needs to get used carefully. This effectively limits IT cost growth and controls wastage but it also limits overall corporate innovation and the gains driven by the experiments that need these additional resources.

I’m a big believer in making effectively infinite computing resources available internally and billing them back precisely to the team that used them. Of course, each internal group needs to show the customer value of their resource consumption. Asking every group to effectively be a standalone profit center is, in some ways, complex in that the “product” from some groups is hard to quantitatively measure. Giving teams the resources they need to experiment and then allowing successful experiments to progress rapidly into production encourages innovation, makes for a more exciting place to work, and the improvements brought by successful experiments help the company be more competitive and better serve its customers.

I argue that all employees should be limited only by their ability rather than an absence of resources or an inability to argue convincingly for more. This is one of the most important yet least discussed advantages of cloud computing: taking away artificial resource limitations in support light-weight experimentation and rapid innovation. Making individual engineers and teams responsible to deliver more value for more resources consumed makes it possible encourage experimentation without fear that costs will rise without sufficient value being produced.