A while back I wrote about how metrics have many different uses, not all of them actionable ones, and used network bandwidth as an example of a non-actionable metric. In a comment, it was suggested that network bandwidth was sort of actionable in that if we reached capacity limits, that should cause us to add more capacity in one of several ways. My first reaction was that this was non-actionable for us because it's mostly something we're not in a position to do. My second reaction was to think about why this is so. My current and not entirely fully baked view is that it comes down to a difference between what we do and what most people are doing. To put it briefly, many people operate services, while we operate an (adequate or good enough) environment.

If you operate services and people have a bad time with them, that is a direct problem. You can probably put some sort of cost figure on the effects of that bad time, and assuming that the services are important (or the numbers large enough), you can probably get funding to fix the problem. If you are running out of bandwidth, you go out and get more bandwidth.

If you operate an environment, you're generally providing the best environment you can with the funding and support you have (and the priorities for where to direct that funding, for example to prioritize network speed over the amount of storage). If this environment is not good enough for some people's tastes, for example because they're running into bandwidth limits, your reaction is probably to shrug sadly. Those people need to talk to the powers that be, and if the powers that be want you to improve some aspect of the environment, they need to either provide more funding or reduce what features you support so that you can focus more money on less surface area.

If you're used to working in a services situation, the environment situation is probably enraging; here you are, having a bad time and no one cares enough to do anything about it. If you're used to operating an adequate environment, the services mindset feels weird. Get more network bandwidth when you run into performance limits? How, and who is going to fund it?

(Generally an environment is adequate if enough people can get enough work done. And I think that in practice there's a spectrum between these two positions, and a mix of situations within a single organization where there are some 'services' in an environment style organization and some 'this environment is good enough' things in a generally service-focused place (I suspect that these are likely to be internal things).)