Surprisingly enough, the "Common language" challenge for Finops was absent in the FinOps Challenges 2022 (https://data.finops.org/#3136)
I'm saying surprisingly, as it is still (for me) a massive challenge, as well as a primary key to implementing an actual cultural change. Without the ability to have the same language that is understandable by the different stakeholders, we will reach poorly defined goals, miscommunication on what is important, misunderstanding of what we want to achieve, and difficulty creating organizational engagement in the FinOps practice.
In the past, based on trial and error we did since 2017, we took the common language challenge seriously and tried different ways to talk with our engineers, our financial teams, and with management. We saw that there was a huge difference when talking with engineers about cost (and the financial impact they create) to talking with them about efficiency and how to define better efficiency metrics. We saw that only showing the expenses to management and talking about how much we spend didn't generate value and misrepresented our endgame, which was to give a clear picture to management over time if we were doing better or worse.
We changed the terminology from "Cost" to "Waste", change "Spend" to "Investment", and "Underutilization" to "Efficiency score" - those things mattered.
So, why am I all riled up about the phrasing "cost-aware"? Simply because it mostly misrepresents the FinOps engineer endgame, and hurts the culture we should be implementing.
Being "cost-aware" means that the teams should work hard implementing mechanisms to understand how much things costs. It means that cost should be a driving factor in decisions and that the focus should be to have all the financial information available for the different teams to be "aware" of. While it is important to have that information for chargeback/showback activities, that is not the driving force in creating a FinOps cultural change in an organization.
Telling a team their workload costs $500/month - is that really what will drive that cultural change? Giving teams dashboards to track their costs reactively - will that be the driving force? My answer is: No!
Language matters.
If you can't create action items for the organization to do from the "cost" metrics (and you can't), you can't drive engagement, which in turn, hurts the effort to drive a cultural change. What is the point of being "aware" of costs, when the follow-up questions and action items are what matters?
Instead of being a "Cost Aware" organization, advance the policy of being "Waste aware" - which generates actionable dashboards and action items for the engineering teams.
Instead of being a "Cost Aware" organization, be a "Cost Sensitive" organization, which doesn't wait to be aware of the costs to implement a policy in the design phase to reach a cost-sensitive technical solution, not cost-driven.
Instead of being a "Cost Aware" organization, promote a "Business Aware" culture to apply business unit economics to our workloads to measure its efficiency. Not how much things costs, but how much value and impact they generate.
The FinOps goal is not to create a cost-aware organization, as it perpetuates the wrong endgame - to just create financial visibility in the organization. FinOps is so much more than this.
Is it important? Absolutely. Will this drive the cultural change we need? Absolutely not.
Be mindful of the terms you use, as they will dictate how far you can reach in your FinOps journey.