Replace bureaucracy with pragmatic, common-sense, market-based resource-governance processes.

Resource-governance processes include budgeting, service catalogs, service costing (rates), prioritization and demand management, portfolio management, chargebacks, allocations, invoicing, financial reporting, and more.

All these processes serve to fund us with budgets, decide what we produce, and track results.

Too often, these processes consist of bureaucratic committees, rigid procedures, complex decision rules, and stifling paperwork.

Sample chapter: The story of poor Robert, who followed "best practices" in financial and resource-governance processes to his dismay....

"The story of Robert mentally took me to many hallways, conference rooms and offices where I've had discussions just like those. It's helpful to step back, realize how common Robert is, and consider how Dean's solutions can break the usual destructive cycle."

Brian Barnier Principal, ValueBridge Advisors

Meanwhile, we all believe in market economics. It's by far the most effective way to channel a society's scarce resources to the purposes that need them the most.

This book explains how to implement market economics inside organizations. Don't worry.... It doesn't require chargebacks. It doesn't lead to arm's-length relationships without any commitment to the enterprise, or undermine enterprise policies and strategies. And it doesn't lead to open internal competition which results in redundancies and lost synergies.

"The most important book on the subject of IT financial management that I'm aware of."

Troy DuMoulin VP of Research, Pink Elephant

Market economics simply provides guiding principles for the design of highly efficient, effective, and agile internal resource-governance processes. It replaces bureaucracy with common sense.

Internal Market Economics offers a fresh vision of empowered, entrepreneurial organizations, and practical solutions to a host of pressing financial and management challenges.

"Internal Market Economics has influenced my thinking. I've asked my entire team read it; and I encourage everyone in our profession to read it."

Chris Pick Chief Marketing Officer, Apptio

From "eyes on the stars down to feet on the ground," you'll see the end-state with clarity, understand your current practices in a broader context, and figure out exactly what you can do to rationalize budget decisions, set realistic expectations, develop a service catalog with cost-based rates, design business-driven priority-setting (portfolio-management) processes, and align internal service providers with enterprise strategies.

Available in hard-cover and Kindle on Amazon, 369 pages. US $28

Or contact us to order a signed copy....

Issues addressed in the book include:

• Demand management, managing expectations

• Unfunded mandates

• Cost transparency

  "When I inherited the Quality Assurance and Improvement function, we had unhappy internal customers, increasing number of defects migrating to production environments, a limited ability to react to changing demands, and testing was seen as a necessary evil.   We used Internal Market Economics to implement a true service model. As a result, customer satisfaction is high, our unit costs are down, our internal revenues are up, we're better able to meet customers' constantly changing demands, and we're investing in test automation and new offerings such as mobile, security, and infrastructure testing.   Internal Market Economics was the catalyst to this tremendous success story."

  Mike Shanno Senior Director, EMC IT

• Business planning and investment-based budgeting

• Service catalogs with rates (service costing)

• Governance, priority setting

• Chargebacks, show-backs

• Allocations

• Cost control

• Downsizing

• Shared services and consolidations

• Benchmarking, outsourcing comparisons

• Management metrics

• Empowerment

Table of Contents....

Video: Overview of Internal Market Economics
a brief video that explains the concept of internal market economics (10 min)

Video: Overview of Internal Market Economics
a brief video that explains the concept of internal market economics (10 min)

What people have said about the book:

Internal Market Economics is a very big, original concept. An important contribution to the literature on governance, and essential reading for executives interested in maximizing shareholder value or in running effective shared-services organizations.

Don Tapscott, best-selling author of 15 books,
most recently the TED e-book Radical Openness

This book is extraordinary! Every CEO should understand these concepts. Budgeting and planning will never be the same in our firm.

Sergio A. Paiz, CEO, PDC Group

Internal Market Economics is an inspiring and refreshing business book that provides a framework to reintroduce the entrepreneurial spirit and a "can do" culture within organizations.

Lars van der Haegen, CEO, Belimo

Excellent piece of writing, and the most important book on the subject of IT financial management that I'm aware of.

Troy DuMoulin, Vice President, Pink Elephant

For over a decade, I've been implementing internal market economics in Fortune 1000 companies. I recommend this book to anyone creating a shared-services organization or taking one to the next level of performance.

Gary P. Rietz, CIO, Schawk, Inc.

Buy this book and do not put it on the shelf with all the other books that you intend to read someday. Read it, reflect on it, argue with it, and most importantly, act on it -- your organization, your customers, and your shareholders will be glad you did.

Harvey R. Koeppel, Co-Founder & Executive Director (retired),
IBM Center for CIO Leadership

This book provides a fresh way to think about financial problems we all face, as well as a practical and useful guide for implementing effective governance processes.

Richard Hartnack, Vice Chairman (retired), U. S. Bank

This is not a rehash of old "profit center" and "cost accounting" theories, but a bold new approach to making crucial resource-allocation decisions. If any part of your company supports the efforts of other parts, you need to understand Internal Market Economics.

Loren G. Carlson, Chairman, CEO Roundtable, LLC

Well written, well researched, thought provoking, with a satisfying blend of cutting-edge theory and real-world examples.

Robert Degnan, CEO, Package Containers Inc.

Financial management can be so dry; but this book is really well written, clear, and concise -- an easy read; but more importantly, it offers valuable concepts and frameworks that can be pragmatically applied, wherever your company might be in implementing internal market economics.

Leah M. Palmer, Associate Director of IT, Procter & Gamble Company

I started reading Internal Market Economics and couldn't stop. It presents a revolutionary, yet proven, vision for customer-centered, entrepreneurial organizations. This book should be at the top of every leader's reading list.

Dr. Bryson R. Payne, Department Head, Computer Science,
University of North Georgia

Internal Market Economics is a comprehensive how-to on the design of highly efficient, effective, and agile resource-governance processes.

Len Bergstrom, Founder, IT Measurement Services, Real Decisions/Gartner

This book explains many real-life problems caused by traditional resource-governance systems within an enterprise, and offers a thorough, yet easy to follow, explanation of how market economics may be used to resolve them.

Carlos I. Castro, Board Member, SulAmerica S.A.

The layout, flow and style made for a smooth and fast read.

Brian Barnier, Principal, ValueBridge Advisors

Robert's story (a fictionalized CIO) incorporates the many lessons Dean Meyer has been recounting over the years, and the telling strikes a nice balance between entertaining and educating. Well done.

Eugene Lukac

Meyer deconstructs a set of complex governance problems into smaller, actionable ones, and provides a straightforward approach to deal with them. I've found the principles in this book to be quite valuable.

Bernie Campbell, CIO (retired), Sonoco Products Company

N. Dean Meyer is one of the earliest proponents of the "business within a business" approach to IT governance, and this book is his distillation of a long career of figuring out the best way to allocate scarce business resources.... For executives who will be running this business-within-a-business, Meyer provides a fast course in how to establish a catalog of products and services, write a business plan that forecasts "sales," allocate costs, set rates, compare the budget with actual user commitments, track utilization, issue internal invoices and set up a dashboard for management and clients.

Mitch Betts, Executive Editor, CIO Magazine

For those interested in creating internal markets within organisations to significantly improve performance, Meyer's book is a good introduction that contains relevant examples and is written in a way that is readily understood.

Professor Keith G. Lumsden, Director, Edinburgh Business School

...an easy to digest and easy to implement guide for leaders. And I am reassured that if I have any questions, I can reach out to [the author] via email or a phone call. Don't believe me, try it!

Andy Hill, King County, Washington

What I most appreciate about Internal Market Economics is that it's readable and accessible... not too much economics and accounting and budgeting mumbo-jumbo like is found in many books of this ilk. Another thing I like are the appendices (which appear to be about 25% of the book) giving practical information about how to implement internal market economics. So, if you want to present the ideas to your Chief-of-whatever-Officer, just have them read the front part of the book. The appendices are for practitioners/implementers. And if you're lucky, the CxO will say: "Wow! This is something we need to do!" And if you're not so lucky, your organization will continue suffering the same problems Robert (in the book) suffers, or just continue to dabble around the edges of something that could be transformational for your organization.

Lori A. Smith, Business Manager, IT Department, University of Iowa

In Internal Market Economics, author Dean Meyer draws upon his years of experience and expertise to deftly write a compelling 396 page compendium on just how entrepreneurs and managers can utilize market economic concepts [for] governance and decision making. Practical, insightful, informed, informative, thoughtful and thought-provoking, Internal Market Economics is thoroughly 'reader friendly' in precept and presentation, making it highly recommended and especially appropriate for personal, professional, corporate, academic, and community library reference collections.

The Midwest Book Review

Internal Market Economics has influenced my thinking. I've asked my entire team read it; and I encourage everyone in our profession to read it.

Chris Pick, Chief Marketing Officer, Apptio

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