Marketing solved the Last Mile Problem decades ago. IT still hasn’t.

In logistics, the Last Mile is the final connection to the user. It is where friction and cost explode. Marketing learned this early: the product is cheap. The access is expensive. We pay for the software once. We pay for the friction every single day.

In IT, the Last Mile is the gap between “license purchased” and “user productive.” That gap is where value dies and cost compounds. To close it, we need to apply these 3 Laws of Capital Allocation:

📉 1. The Distribution Tax (TCO > Price)

Marketing teaches that businesses spend far more on access (distribution) than on the product itself.

  • The Trap: We obsess over the licensing fee (the product).
  • The Reality: The logistics of access (Identity, SSO, Provisioning) are our distribution costs.
  • The Lesson: Access friction is a daily tax on productivity. Like any tax, it compounds. The Year 3 cost of friction always exceeds the Year 1 cost of the license.

⚖️ 2. The Denominator Trap

In pricing strategy, if we optimize for margin per unit, the cheap product wins. If we optimize for margin per customer, the high-retention product wins. Goldratt called this throughput accounting: optimize the system, not the component.

  • The Trap: Service desks optimizing for “Cost Per Ticket” (Unit Efficiency) rather than “Employee Productivity” (Throughput).
  • The Reality: Saving $50 on a laptop is a loss if it costs the employee 50 hours of productivity. The metric that matters is throughput time: the gap between a user requesting access and actually being productive. That is what IT should optimize for.
  • The Lesson: We destroy value (LTV) while congratulating ourselves on saving money (COGS).

🏛️ 3. Segmentation ≠ Unfairness

True customer centricity is not treating everyone the same. It is segmenting by value and risk, then allocating friction accordingly.

  • The Trap: Applying a “one-size-fits-all” security policy to a Quota-Carrying Sales Rep and a Back-Office Contractor.
  • The Reality: This isn’t fairness. It is capital inefficiency. A sales rep losing 30 minutes to login friction is a missed client meeting, a delayed deal, a direct revenue hit. A contractor losing 30 minutes is billable time burned. Same friction. Different damage. The cost isn’t the hourly rate. It’s the opportunity lost.
  • The Lesson: Fairness is giving each user the right amount of friction for their context, not the same amount of friction regardless of context.

Strategic Question: When we pitch a cost-saving initiative, are we selling the reduction of the numerator (price), or the protection of the denominator (employee output)?