Respondents to a recent IT Manager channel poll spoke of issues facing IT departments as they tried to balance shrinking budgets with growing demands from users within organisations.
One CIO said he struggled with poor staffing, disbelieving management and budget shrinkage. "I believe that management need to be trained to accept IT as a business cost, and decide how much of the overall bottom line to assign to it and just stick by it," the CIO argued.
"I also believe that most IT managers are not strong enough with boards and other management--they need to define clearly what is and what is not a flexible expense, and outline the ramifications of removing line items from budgets."
His suggestions included charging back to departments which used services or bought goods, and budgeting projects at "real world" pricing.
"When money runs out, make it blaringly obvious to the board that the reason that their pet project did not [go] ahead was due to lack of available funding," he said. "The problem we have found with this, however, is that all of these methods broadens the 'us and them' divide between business and IT--it is non-productive and generally turns the organisation into a bureaucracy."
Another respondent suggested having pre-budget meetings with users. "Talk their language," the respondent advised. "For example, replace server to improve response times."
Stopping spending money on IT infrastructure wasn't a favoured solution for respondents, although some did say that projects were rescheduled to cope with budgetary constraints.
"It really is a false economy to halt spending on IT. Software and hardware degrades over time--as businesses change, develop and grow the stresses and strains on application software, system software and hardware take their toll," said another IT professional.
"Application software will degrade with constant tweaking and changing. System software becomes obsolete or, at least, unsupported and hardware becomes overloaded, slow and, again, out of support."
Using the panic approach with users was the method one IT pro used where he worked. "I will relate the problem to the overall effect it has on running of the business. Say, if a mission-critical server is slow and the cost of replacement is substantial, my argument would be in line with slowness of the system that has affected the customers, warehouse and overall business," he said.
"I have found that mostly the CFO or MD in my organisation are not interested in the deep technical issues of IT, instead they are interested in the affect of the problem on the business."
2%
4%
I think the last paragraph says it all very neatly. Of course the business is not interested in technical discussions, if you want to spend someone's money, surely they are justified in expecting an explanation in their language that they can understand.
What about relating all your applications to business purposes and then relating all your infrastructure to the systems that they support and enable? Do this in advance, and when budget time comes around, it is all much easier.
Further, learn the language of the business whose money you spend, and get in the habit of talking to them often and in a positive way. You will find that the "divide" is easily crossed, as long as you realise that it is you who has to do the crossing, not them.