The new era of financial responsibility forces the IT department to engage in something we are not overly good at: making a business case for what is essentially a voluntary expense.
Once we assess the need for new hardware and believe in that need, unfortunately, our job has just begun. The halcyon days of unlimited approval for hardware purchases have passed. Although this new era of financial responsibility is frankly much better for business as a whole, it forces the IT department to engage in something we are not overly good at: making a business case for what is essentially a voluntary expense.
Hold on now. Voluntary expense? Information is the lifeblood of the modern company. Without computers we cannot move that information, sort it into useable data, and make it available to business decision makers.
Although the above is true, we can already do that. People have access to key functions from IT to simplify their work. Furthermore, they have already come to peace with whatever blockades our systems and policies put in place that they cannot get around. In order to justify new expenses, especially on hardware, we have to offer more than just business as usual. We have to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the hardware purpose addresses an understandable business need.
Stating the business need
Many cases for new hardware fail before they get to the point of presenting facts, research, or even options. They fail not because they are badly written, or because the presenter fails to put in long, painful hours working on them. Rather, they fail because the author fails to clearly state what business need this purchase will address.
Take the example of a 40-page hardware purchase request that once crossed my desk. The author spent a month researching options. He outlined 10 separate scenarios, defining them in terms of both technical recommendations and user impact. He worked with the vendors, beating them down to almost unheard of pricing levels. In the end, though, his company chose not to go forward. He forwarded it to me after the fiasco to try to work out what went wrong.
After reading it, I could not figure out what business need he wished to address. So I gave him a quick call. After a quick exchange of pleasantries we got down to business. "Why," I asked, "did you need this new hardware?"
"It's crazy," he replied. "These servers are going to come off of lease in six months. If we don't get them replaced, our monthly hardware bill will triple, and our support contract will double in price."
"So, your business need is cost avoidance? You never mention that anywhere in this hardware request. Might want to do that."
He did not respond for a while. "I guess." He resubmitted the case with the articulated need and received his hardware.
Simply defining the business need
In the above case, we had the simplest and most common business need we encounter in IT. A situation exists, be it increased support costs over time or a lease expiring, that is going to dramatically increase the cost of maintaining the IT infrastructure. The business needs to avoid this cost, potentially by spending some amount of money up front. In this case, we can articulate the business need as "We need to spend X money to avoid spending Y over Z years." We call this cost avoidance. If X is greater than Y, of course, you may have trouble creating a believable business case.
