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How Do You Justify the Existence of IT?
bakamaki writes "I work for a small manufacturing company as a SysAdmin. My boss is a DBA. We are the only IT employees. He recently decided to record hours spent on his projects and then evaluate how much time the databases he writes save the employees. Then he translates that into a $ figure. He's asking me to do something similar but I'm kinda at a loss. It seems most of the stuff I do is preventative, IE care and feeding of servers and network infrastructure in addition to all the break fix stuff I do for the user base with their desktops. When in this position what do you folks usually do?"
n/t
How to spelling a headline?
That's because you're taking technology for granted. If you weren't there, that technology couldn't be deployed to help people get their jobs done. Which means no servers, no desktops, no laptops, no networks, no printers, nothing, nada, zip, zilch, zero.
Now all you have to do is compute how much it would cost to get common tasks done. Take handouts for a meeting as an example. Right now I'm sure that the employees type up the documents then print a few copies off the printer. Since we're talking about modern wordpressor technology, it would take them 2-3 complete, hand-written (or perhaps typewriter typed) drafts to develop the same document. Then they'd need to run the final document through the copy machine for the number of copies they need.
How much would all that labor cost?
That document would then have to be backed up into filing cabinets. Take a rough estimate of the number of documents that go through your system. Work out a figure for how many documents would fit in your average filing cabinet. How much would those cabinets cost? How much would the extra floor space cost? How much would staff to manage the filed documents cost?
Now on to email. Remember inter-office memos? Back when entire mail departments were needed just to distribute memos between employees? Find out how many employees usually staffed these mail rooms. Add to this the cost of inboxes on desks, mail carrying equipment, space needed by the average mail room, and/or (if your company is really big) the infrastructure cost of pnuematic tubes.
Does anyone in your company do spreadsheets? Imagine if they had to do these sheets by hand, on paper. Figure out how many seconds it would take you to do a spreadsheet calculation by hand. (Perhaps with the assistance of a calculator.) Take that time and work out a cost per calculation based on some common salary. (e.g. $100k/yr) Now multiply it by a few hundred to account for the dozens of calculations in a spreadsheet that must be calculated and recalculated for each change to the document. That is the cost of a single spreadsheet.
Presentations... remember overhead projectors? What you want to do is compute the cost of overhead projectors, plus the cost to have a third-party like Kinkos print up a set of transparencies. Take the number of conference rooms, multiply by the cost of an overhead projector. Estimate the number of presentations per year and work out what it would cost to print, say, 50 transparencies per presentation. Multiply those figures and add to the previous overhead projector figures.
I haven't even gotten into subjects like billing, reporting, and other data processing. Feel free to work out the cost of mainframes or (even worse) a small army of accountants and typists.
If you're following along so far, you should already have a rather significant figure. One that should dwarf your IT budget. And you should also have a greater appreciation for why corporations of the 60's and 70's were so amazingly big.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Sounds like he's trying to justify firing you and hiring you back as an hourly contractor to cut costs. Go watch the part in Office Space where the guy is yelling at the bobs about how he communicates between the customer and the engineers. You're that guy.
Good Luck.
moox. for a new generation.
Possibly something like "How much IT infrastructure saves your other employees in hours worked"?
Then make the point that someone has to maintain all of that stuff in order to keep all of those employees working on what they need to be doing instead of figuring things out with clipboards and calculators?
____________________
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404 Translation server error
Make nice with someone in Finance/Accounting/etc. and get statistics on what the average productivity figure is per worker for the various functions that make up the company. From there you can calculate not only the cost of downtime but also the improvements in efficiency when common tasks are made easier via the databases/applications that are deployed.
.. when things DON'T work. If the email server is down, how much does it decrease efficiency of communications. If the web server is down, how much revenue is lost? Or how many existing customers do you lose or prospective customers that go away? How much extra work does customer service get when the web site is broken?? If my desktop doesn't work, how much is the company spending for me to sit around doing nothing. That is the value if IT infrastructure.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Write up everything you do then take bids from other companies to replace you.
How I justifying IT?
If you are have to justifying IT, I thinking it is firstly important to be answering the question "What is IT?" Only then can you be clarifying the answering of the questionifying of the justification.
This guy's the limit!
Develop a worse-case scenario. Detail all of the problems that may occur without your system maintenance work (system hijacking, malware, trojans, client info loss, etc), and then write the amount of money each of these theoretical problems would cost the company. now add all those costs. i'm pretty sure you make less than whatever figure you end up getting. buena suerte
When my Karma level reaches 0 I feel in piece with the Universe
There are 5 valid reasons for any business decision:
1. Legal: laws, rules and regulations
2. Contractual requirements
3. Positive impact to the bottom line by increasing revenue and/or decreasing expenses.
4. Quality of life issue for your customers
5. Quality of life issue for employees
You can look at things like backups and preventative maintenance as addressing both #1 and #3 as matters of risk reduction and business enablement. How much would it cost your company to not have its data? Or to not have access to it for 4, 8, 12, 24, or 48 hours?
Then you can look at the direct costing method: how many projects have you worked on, what were their budgets (capital and otherwise) and how much did your work contribute toward that?
Your CEO should buy a Mac for everyone in the company and fire the whole IT department.
"How to Justifying the Existence of IT?" ??!!
How is babby formed?
-Jon in Canada
Perception is more important than reality in this case.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
It sounds like you need to do a risk analysis. For each of those "preventative maintenance" tasks you do, you may be able to quantify:
(Unfortunately tis can be difficult for numerous reasons. Even if you can reasonably determine the probabilities and costs of individual risks becoming realized, two or more risks might not have independent probabilities. Also, if two or more risks are actualized at the same time, their cost to the business may not simply be the sum of their costs if they were to happen just one at a time.)
The ultimate answer to whether or not you should do those tasks will depend on management's risk tolerance.
At least, that seems to be the mathematical answer. I'm not sure what you should do when it's impossible to confidently calculate the probability and cost of various risks.
If you're getting a lot of heat from management, maybe the best solution is to take a leave of absence for two months and work a contract somewhere. Then pop your head in and see how they did without you?
The business could not operate without computers. You make the computers work, therefore, 100% of revenue is dependent on you. Your ROI is $revenue/$your_cost * 100 percent. None are more valuable. Ask for either more money or exemption from these stupid and unproductive exercises.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Inflate your statistics because they will usually be correct if they do not have onsite support. If they farm it out to offsite support, they may not be available and when they become available, the staff has to get to the site (travel time) and then they have to get up to speed on that particular vendors setup (which takes twice as long as someone who is already familiar). Whatever the time is for you to get something taken care of, it will be 4-8 times as bad without you there. So here is a good calc:
Number of machines (if 1 machine=1 person) x 5.5(average of above factor) x (number of hours spent fixing problem) x (average employee wage).
So if you spent 4 hrs, fixing a machine that caused 20 employees to be unproductive (or potentially avoided unproductivity), take 80 times their average wage (we'll say $15), TIMES 5.5. $6600 was just saved on that one task.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I get the same type of request from my boss. Every 6 months or so he calls me (and my assistant) into his office and asks 'what do you guys DO all day?'. As I try to stifle my rage I explain to him that aside from working on projects he starts, I also have to do DBA, Web, Office Admin...from the purchasing of servers to removing paper jams, we do it all.
I think the problem stems from management not being able to quantify our work, if we spend 4 hours trying to fix a piece of code..and then succeed in doing so, what is there to show for it?
I also think one of ITs responsibilities is to be 'on call' for emergencies, so that does mean when times are slow we will occasionally find ourselves with nothing to do, that does not mean we are superfluous? Walk into your local fire or police station and tell the men and women on duty who happen to be sitting around 'hey, your fired'...then wait for the flames to hit your house.
If it's a manufacturing company, point to the machines on the production line and the routine maintenance (oiling, cleaning, checking) that gets done on them. How much does that maintenance improve productivity? How much time does the maintenance guy's work save other workers? And what happens to the company's output when that maintenance doesn't happen?
Or, for a more graphic example, point to the restroom. How much time does having the janitor clean it save other employees? How much does that cleaning contribute to the company's bottom line? And what are the consequences if the restroom isn't cleaned every day? Or the trash cans emptied, or the floor cleaned?
Count the amount of time your servers are NOT down during the year, and multiply that by the cost in lost productivity that would have resulted if they were not available. That's your value.
Maybe then you'll end up being his manager (as it should be - because as any good SysAdmin knows, a database is just another application).
Just stop working for 2 months and then ask the CEO how much money he lost. =)
Just calculate the cost of paying an outside business to fix whatever breaks, and for tech support. So look back and what you have done over the course of the past 3 months. Figure out what the going rate in your area is for onsite repair, be sure to add a little extra because someone else isn't as familiar with your system as you are, and don't forget any sort of travel fees. Look at every time your phone rang and multiply that by the going rate for phone tech support. Don't forget after hours support (anything after 5pm) gets charged more.
Slashdot = Learning about new stuff to use at work @$25/hr
What's happening if they cannot use their desktops? Or the servers are down? How much this costs?
L.
When in this position what do you folks usually do?"
Have a good employment backup plan.
well. you back up your boss' database right? :-)
how many times do you restore for your users? How much is that worth? How much does downtime cost? Do you have a web presence? how many hits per day? What's that worth. How much is downtime worth if your users get wormed/trojan-ed? Any intellectual property there? What is that gets walking?
Its a good exercise to do. You'll pay for yourself twice, then ask for a raise
All you do is stop doing your job and wait for everything to crash, then figure out how much money the company lost.
(don't make the mistake of thinking this is a humourous response - it's not. it's a fact.)
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Your points about technology saving money are true, but irrelevant. No one is proposing going back to doing by hand things that are currently done by computer.
The right comparison, IMHO, should be between how much your salary costs, compared to how much would be spent if everyone did by themselves the work you do. Compare the productivity of office jobs supported by a well trained professional to the productivity of unsupported amateurs.
This is a fairly simple question: if your mail/DNS/storage/internet link/print queue goes down, how long would it take for someone in the organization to fix it, or (failing that as an option) how much will it cost to bring in an outside contractor to fix it, and how long will you be down for??
You'd have to be an awfully small shop with a lot of people who can do all of your tasks before most places could realistically get rid of their IT people -- doing so would mean that the first technical glitch would mean you're dead in the water. Heck, if you're a small enough shop, complete failure could be catastrophic to your business.
Having said that, that doesn't mean some companies might not seriously ponder getting rid of IT and then get blindsided when they discover why they had it in the first place. Companies make short sighted decisions all the time.
Pro-actively trying to justify your existing by coming up with your own metrics is a suckers game. It means someone will then try to use your own damned metrics to squeeze more out of you or do the same with one fewer people.
If your organization has no idea of why they have IT people around and why they're of value, you're already in deep trouble.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Leave. Don't let any employer ever undervalue you. If he thinks he can do better without you, give him that chance. Educate yourself and put yourself in a better position with a better company. If the economy is shyt where you live, move. Become this private contracter and work on multiple projects. Or start your own consulting company. Or hire on with NoName company that has excellent benefits and work/life balance.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
It's IT.
What is IT?
IT's so cool, IT's so hip, IT's alright.
IT's so groovy, IT's outta sight.
You can touch IT, smell IT, taste IT so sweet.
But IT makes no difference cuz IT knocks you off your feet.
I managed to reduce helpdesk calls from 50 per week in a 50 person office to only 5 per week. I audited the existing network infrastructure and services and re-engineered the works over a single long weekend. Afterwards, I could relax in my office, write documentation and chat on instant messenger. This was a summer student position. The manager was so grateful for the reduction in calls from users had it not been a government department I would have been offered a permanent job. As it worked out that launched a great career in IT.
Of course maybe you are by posting on slashdot.
Do you look at truely critical systems? Meaning if the network goes down, does the manufacturing stop?
If so, ask how much it costs the businness to be down...per minute.
Example, I works on a system where every minute down cost almost a 1000 bucks.
so 2 hours down, and they have lost my salary for the year.
Now you can easily to a Cost/Risk analysis.
In my case, I listed several problem I had caught in advance with the time they would probably be down for in the last year.
One example, I caught a server sound 'wrong' and had a replacementordered and prepared. the ordering and preperation took 7 days. The bad server failed 1 day after I added the new server.
For he report, I assumed that under a critical situation we could ahve the server there that day and prepped in 4 hours, tested in 2 and online. Best case 8 hours from failure to up.
Lets see:
60,000 and hour
8 Hour 480,000
Granted that was the most extreme thing that happened, On the plus side the server team got a redundant system and a principle IS guy.
Oh, I was a programmer who got stuck overseeing the servers because they went cheap on the employees.
Just change evryone's password then leave, after putting a report saying that your job is priceless... I really don't think they'll disagree after that, even thought they may replace you soon enough.
There is only one way to justify a cost center (like IT): metrics. Metrics can't be pulled out of thin air on a Friday afternoon, so you need to get them as you work.
The easiest way to do so is to setup a ticket system; there is plenty of free products out there, my favorite on Windows being BTNet. Once you have the system setup, you nicely ask people to send their support requests at at specific email address (which will feed the ticket database -- a built-in feature in most products). And for the users who don't comply, you do it yourself (do not add burden to end user while you start fishing for metrics). As for the stuff you do on your own, create tickets as well, in a specific category.
Once the requests are in the system, make a good follow-up (categories, statuses, notes, etc) and make sure to show this to your end users. This will bring two benefits: on one hand people will happily see your workload and where their request is located in your pipeline (and bugger you less), and on the second hand you can organize your day more efficiently.
After a while, the opening and closing of tickets will provide you with *metrics*; that is, figures that you can show your boss (even charts). Keeping metrics is almost magical, because in a few Excel manipulations you can build a business case, like: "I spend 5 hours a week debugging this printer, if we change it for a new model it will be paid for in X months". This shows your manager that you are a business-wise IT guy, which is a valuable skill.
Then the big splash: build a performance dashboard. A performance dashboard can be as simple as a Excel worksheet where you list your most important metrics: hours spent on end-user supports, average response time, hours spent on hardware maintenance, hours of unplanned downtime, etc. Those metrics are called KPI (Key Performance Indicator) and they can provide a basis for your management to evaluate your work. A good dashboard can be great to make goals (reduce response time by 1/2 over the next three months) or to spot biggest cost centers.
If you provide your boss or the management with a weekly or monthly dashboard they will be able to figure out what you do -- much more than a louse Todo.txt and a "BTW I also do such and such". With solid figures, the management will think of your work as a business item, and that one time when the big boss came by your cubicle and caught you reading comics won't have such a negative impact, because your work is clearly defined in the dashboard.
Of course it is possible that bringing numbers up will show that you are, indeed, redundant. If so, then at least you can use this experience as a great tale for future interview, to display your level of professionalism. And getting a bit of management experience is always good for a resume.
Once you have metrics you can define what is the most critical aspects of your work; this is called a KPI (Key Performance Indicator), and any decent manager will be completely comfortable with a nice Excel dashboard filled with KPI -- much more than with a bunch of Todo.txt files and "BTW I also do X an Y".
The first thing to do is to setup a ticket system. There are plenty available for free; on Windows my favorite one is BugTracker.Net (http://ifdefined.com/bugtrackernet.html).
lucm, indeed.
Its not an easy sell but IT and more so security is an insurance policy. If you can demonstrate the cost of a failure or loss due to lack of IT and or security it is a lot easier for bean counter to swallow. I have always wanted to ask the guy who is trying to cut my budget if he carries health insurance. Because if he really follows his logic he could not possibly justify the cost.
"Waitress I need two more boat-drinks..."
how you should justify the cost of the time spent calculating the cost.
Unplug all the servers and clients for a day, and calculate how much that costs. Now tell him you work every to prevent that from happening.
It sounds like you do a lot of preventive maintenance. Now what you might want to look at here is how much income would be lost for the company if their employees sat around waiting for an outsourced tech to come and fix their systems, as opposed to having you on staff, PREVENTING those lost hours.
Your best course of action is to stall until he forgets about it. "I need some more time to look into that" If that doesn't work, tell him you need to see some balance sheets and payroll records before you can make any dollar estimate.
Unless you think your boss is doing this for your benefit (justify a raise), nothing good can come from participating in these completely ridiculous games.
You boss is clearly very, very stupid. I would try to find another job.
1. Determine how much money you want to make each year. $175,000 sounds good.
2. Triple that.
3. Document loss of revenue related to your simulated non-presence and make sure it meets or exceeds that number, but don't go crazy. This can be done honestly by determining the average contribution of each employee to gross revenue, based on having IT vs. not having it (having to either muddle through themselves (less time to work) or outsource (more capital expenditure.))
4. Congratulate them on having the business sense get a good deal paying you $175k/year instead of losing $525K/year.
Hope something happens while you're gone.
"When in this position what do you folks usually do?"
I usually start looking for a new job.
You reduce your company's exposure, or risk, to certain failures.
Part of quantifying that is stating the cost of catastrophe. That's the big scary part of the pitch.
But since there is always competition afoot (outsourcing IT), you must also quantify how much time the little things you do save the company, if say the response time of an outside IT vendor is 24 hours or whatever it would be. If you need to know what the response time is, call some as if you were looking to outsource your company's IT and ask them. Then add a little because it's never as efficient as they'll claim.
You could take your 2 weeks of vacation, and not take any calls; Let the users that depends on you calculate how much they lost...
I'd really say that a better metric is to start from the system that exists today. Now consider that you're department is no longer there, and a virus wipes out everything (without maintenance, it's not a question of if, but of when).
Now, calculate the cost to the business in lost man hours (count everyone because the virus will spread without an IT team to catch it and clear it out). Add in the cost of hiring an outside firm to come in to clean it up. Add in the costs of possible lawsuits from customer data being stolen by the virus that infected the network. Add in lost revenue for business functions not being able to process things in a timely manner. Now, to be reasonable, cut that figure in half (they'd figure out how to get some stuff working).
There you go... a figure so astronomical (and based on actual valid data) that they will be blown away by how much your department does that they regularly forget about.
If you didn't have IT, then you'd have Windows 7 with a support contract, and all cloud services. Of course then you'd be a slave to MS's uptime and additions/subtractions of functionality, rearranging of the GUI, etc.
from the all-about-roi dept.
It's always about the king, isn't it....
This guy's the limit!
In a good business, it's about the efficiency of works done, and fair profit distribution. Not justifying your salary and job description with others'.
This should produce responsible hard working employees and it shouldn't be sacrificed for the employees' satisfaction, I'm sure other arrangements could be made for such.
The easiest way to prove that not only are you a necessary part of ANY organization, but also that your contributions are invaluable and unmeasurable;
go on a 2 week vacation and turn off your phone.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
I see a lot of "take a vacation" or "leave and them them call you when they panic" comments. These are really bad ideas, but they all point to the real issue. To determine the benefit and cost-effectiveness of your employment in the company, what you really need to figure out is the cost of your absence.
It's difficult to see the benefits of your being there when everything runs along happily, so you want to evaluate the consequences of your job either not being performed, or being performed at a lower level or with a slower response that would be consistent with an outsourced IT support company.
Whats the cost of a delayed installation of a security update that keeps your data functional and secure? How much is the cost of mismanaged backups? How much does 2 hours of downtime cost compared to a day or two? If servers are involved, you get to multiply the numbers. This is just some hints, but as you go about your tasks, ask yourself: "What would happen if I DIDN'T do this?" Those answers would likely help you put this together. Just remember to boil down the techie speak if your management does speak "tech".
Microsoft was big on selling "solutions" rather then "features". Try not to focus on system failues, focus on the consequences of those failues (inability to communicate, deadlines missed, sales lost, idle employees, etc)
Hopefully this makes sense, I'm getting off my soapbox now. TGIF.
...into the necessity of preventive maintenance for IT infrastructure, then perhaps you should study up on this fellow's techniques
Ask him, "How does one justify a Fire Department if your house has never burned down?"
Find out how much product, in dollars, your company produces in one hour on a typical day. That is you max value per hour. Then find out how many people it takes to produce that product. Divide the big total by this number. This is your dollar per person per hour value. Now multiply by 8, then by 5. This is your dollar per person per week value.
You see where I'm going...
E
Eric Aitala
www.f1m.com
Go on vacation and see how things hold up.
Many questions can be answered with another question, especially this one.
Boss: "Just how important do you think your IT department is?"
You: "I don't know, how would you like to try running your business without it a few months?"
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
You've been asked to justify your cost. Here's a hint: Your BOSS needs to justify your cost, not you. Not to say you don't need to have input into the situation, but he's asking you for the wrong thing.
Next, Start fixing up your resume. It's likely you will either get hit with a paycut, or one, of the two of you will be let go. It doesn't matter if they can't survive with only 1 of you. They will toss one of you, outsource the rest, pay more and regret it, but you will still be out of a job and they won't bring you back.
Tech is a necessity. If you don't have it, then you can't compete. Period.
The productivity gains that have been made over the last decade or so are because of tech. If it weren't for tech, we Americans would be completely impoverished right now.
That's the internet posting site version of why tech is a necessity. A real version of why will cost 50,000 EU
Tell him you will take a long vacation and will not be available for tech support. You are priceless!
When I was working as a data warehouse developer for a large insurance & annuity company I was asked a similar question to justify my salary.
I just picked my biggest win, which was a proactive conservation system, and showed how my project increased revenues from $10m annually before, to $125m in the first year after and $250m in the 2nd year after implementation.
I wrote something to the effect of "I could go on, but I believe I have already satisfied the requirements of the original query".
I'm thinking he's looking for total cost to support the salary you have. This means more than just how many hours you actually do work. This includes how much time is saved if you prevent an outage, be it email, file server, web server and so on. Think of it this way if you have an e-commerce site that provides revenue to the company, how much money is being lost if it goes down? then compare it to your salary and how long it would take for you to fix it.
There are a couple of reasons a company has an IT department:
1. Provide technology more efficiently by letting specialists handle it. This is the kind of maintenance work and break/fix stuff that most end-users associate with IT.
2. Utilize specialists to do stuff with all the company data that goes beyond the basics. For example, if you can write automate a process that eliminates someone doing full-time manual work, you've just saved a bunch of money.
Companies without formal IT departments are grouped around two extremes. Most are small businesses these days. One side is the "clueless" side. This is the company where the boss goes out and buys PCs from Best Buy, consumer-grade hardware/software, etc. and has a cobbled-together network environment. Usually, the boss's nephew who's "real good with computers" has set the place up and let it fester for years. Any small-business contractor can give you a million horror stories like this. The other extreme is the "tech-savvy wild west" environment. Everyone is allowed to bring in their own machines, their own software, etc. Both of these extremes tend to have a lot of downtime. The ones in the middle strike a happy balance -- they'll often bring in a consultant to help them get up and running, and follow most recommendations.
Places with IT departments tend to take things a little slower, and they frustrate users who come from environments like the above. Having IT do simple things like not let you load your own software so they can keep track of who owns what is just the first step. The next reason you're there is to help the company do useful things with the technology they've bought. (This is a huge disconnect with a lot of IT people. When everything is over with, it's all about how much you actually contribute. If you're just doing maintenance, you're always going to be looked on as an expense, not an asset.)
I always wonder how many people claim to provide IT, when in fact they only provide intelligent typewriters.
Do propper IT, if e-mails need to be processed by hand, you are doing something wrong. A company with IT barely needs anybody else, as computer can be programmed to do most business tasks people do in day to day business.
can't these n00bs configure their own exchange servers? *nerdrage*
I usually break a few extra things, make key databases go "offline" for no apparent reason, and make them scream for help. Do that for a few days and claim the server "crashed" and needed a restore from the backups. They will usually leave you be for a few months or so after that before the cycle starts again.
Every time you "fix a broken desktop", you're saving the company the cost of a brand new desktop, minus the price of parts + your labour. If you like, throw in a day of lost productivity for the user who has to configure and acclimatize to the new system.
It's a gross underestimate of the real value, but even a PHB should accept it.
If you need to counter the argument, "well, if you could fix it then so could the user," keep a list of the problems you've fixed and how frequently each one occurred (i.e. diverse problems with low frequency). That's where your expertise is most valuable.
I've told this story in these hallowed bits before. A good friend of mine worked for a small organization. He was their only IT guy.
Not only was he a good sysadmin, but he was a DBA, email guru, security specialist, the usual list of stuff every org needs. His new boss, hot to save money, put him through the same paces. Cut to the chase, my buddy lost his job over the reasoning that nothing ever goes down around here, why pay an FTE to maintain it?
The boss got his comeuppance about 8 months later when the infrastructure went to hell and a hand basket.
My friend got some sad selfish satisfaction telling them 'no' when they needed the inevitable work on the database system he wrote. Apparently they wouldn't sign a liability waiver.
Don't let the short sightedness of the higher ups harm you. You are a tech. You need to speak to your bosses in BUSINESS TERMS.
There is no 'value' in IT. You are the steward of the company data. Your value is tied to the value of the data, specifically, the loss of that data. You, yes you, need to point out the Bad Things that happen when data is left to it's own devices.
You do not troubleshoot borked Office installs on Windows workstations, you prevent the waste of money by an idle resource. You enable productivity of the staff that actually makes money for the company.
You do not report X troubletickets handled for the month, you report Z hours of productivity loss prevention. Your on-site response time is a BIG PART of this--make sure they know it. A four hour response 24X7 support contract is going to cost the company big time.
Remember, your metrics MUST be in business terms, not IT terms. It is your job to make sure the suits see you as Electricity, or running water.
Seriously, if a company is asking you to justify the existence of it's IT department that means it has a classic misunderstanding of IT in general, and will probably pinch pennies and cut headcount in your company until there is nobody left.
A few years ago a new staff member started at my company with the idea to try and "justify" the existence of IT. All development and support requests had to be justified by a signed piece of paper outlining how much cost was being reduced or sales were being increased.
This extra work cost the company literally tens of thousands of dollars in extra BS, and the end result was that executive lost his job for pissing off everyone in the company by wasting their time.
IMO the best way to manage your IT budget is based on the funds available and the demands of your customers and employees. If you are running a tight ship where everyone in IT is super busy, and people are always asking for more then you are probably OK. If your IT group is sitting on their butts and nobody cares, it's time to reduce budgets and headcount.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Is the button glowing?
You do know how a button works don't you?
No, not on clothes...
Yeah, justifying Moss and Jen is easy... Roy? Well I need to think about that... And Richmond, well I'm still wondering about that magazine...
They will appreciate you without any need for writen justification.
Come on, just disable the anti-spam, they will get the point.
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
When in this position what do you folks usually do?
Leave. And find another job with a slightly more competent manager:-)
0x or or snor perron?!
"no IT, no network for your macs"
My original comment was meant in jest, but I want to respond to this. Macs have been networkable since 1984; no OS networks more easily. My house had 6 networked Macs with shared printers in 1995.
TCP/IP networking is harder than Mac-only (i.e., AppleTalk or Rendezvous/Bonjour), but I don't think it's a big deal. Maybe I've developed a blind spot to it.
I'm not saying network administration is worthless by any means, but a smaller organization, ~50 users, can definitely get by without full-time IT as long as there's one good power user.
"Your suggestion would definitely get rid of the problem of employees wasting their time away web surfing or posting on slashdot instead of working..."
Zing! Thank you for that. I'll meet you at the unemployment office and buy you a beer. ;-)
That is like staying single cause the hookers are cheaper then a wife. Which is a lot of what is wrong with America today. Even the vast majority of production has been outsourced. Once even the middle class in this country could afford a one or more member household staff, now it's fast food and automatic clothes/dishwashers. Oversimplification? Sure, but think about it for a while and also remember every "value added" step is also a tax and transportation added to cost step. Loyalty has accordingly dropped significantly as well.
Answer:
"See Cost Benefit Analysis of DBA. If the computers aren't up, he can't do shit. So, it's that amount + $1 MINIMUM.
Now leave me alone so I can go back to reading /."
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
Many business units, dissatisfied with the speed, efficiency, general business savvy (and lack thereof) of the IT Department, engage external consultants and roll their own systems (the so-called shadow IT problem in many companies). A chargebacks system actually empowers those business units to spend their money externally; if I can get an invoice from internal IT, I can get an invoice from an external vendor.
The wily IT Department could/should encourage behavior such as this - if only to force a decent analysis of total delivered cost.
For example; the simplest exercise might be to compare hourly rates, external consultant vs. internal employee. Have you ever figured out your hourly rate? To keep the math simple, we'll take annual salary and divided by 2000 (40 hours per week times 50 weeks per year). Actually, let's be apply a 30% benefits load, to get a better picture of total cost to the company. Again, to keep the math simple - let's say you make $100,000 per year. ($100K/year * 1.3) / 2K hrs/year = $65 bucks an hour.
$65/hour - just try to find folks skilled at ERP implementations, DBA/data warehouse, high availability data center architecture, and/or any other sufficiently specialized vertical technology at that hourly rate ... if you can, and you're near Chicago, please give me a call!
The numbers work for any area of the country; if your high-powered consultants are less than $100 an hour, then your annual salaries probably ratchet down as well. There's also a minor flaw in my over-simplifications ... relatively few hard-working IT employees only work 40 hours a week!
No wonder that internal IT folks, once clued in to this apparent inequity, long to give up their corporate job and hang out a shingle of their own.
Internal IT has a huge cost advantage.
See Also:
Chargebacks Redux - Some Good May Come Of It
Yet Another Discussion on IT Chargebacks
Defining the Business Value of a Project
Thoughts on Why Tech Folks Need to Sweat the Administrivia Details
- jpmacl
Just get quotes on hosted email like hosted exchange, hosted document management, hosted file servers, tech support services, i.e. everything you do. It will come out pretty quickly how much you're worth to company. Outsourcing sounds good until you look at how much it can really cost compared to just having a small IT staff.
1. If you can find someone who works for a company that doesn't have a professional IT presence... have them tell you all the trouble they have and how much time gets wasted waiting for a consultant.
2. If you are too busy on some days, you should be asking for a part time guy to help out. Record all the crap you run into and your time to see if it's justified.
3. After you record your list, take all the high priority items and point them out. It should be obvious how much business is hurt when email is down or the payroll computer goes down on payroll day. And then point out the small emergencies. How long can payroll not be able to print before they are stuck working all night? How long can management be without their blackberries?
4. Take into consideration if one of the viruses of yesterday hits your network. We had one at an old company that jumped across shared folders on windows networks. One whole branch office went down completely. How much did that cost the company? (Yeah, they were skimpy on IT budget big time).
5. What other time critical things does your company run up against? Do they deal with bids or deadlines of any type? Could they lose a million dollar deal if your network was down a day?
6. If your company is really being a jerk about this, go ahead and look for a better place to work. Maybe next time practice your people skills up and make sure you are friendly with at least a few managers. In IT you almost always get the chance to meet them... just make sure you aren't an ass to them and do your job well. Usually that helps life out in a company as much as your real work.
It spit out the universe. And then there was this spider-like entity that came along with it. It crashed to Earth around the time of the dinosaurs, then eventually humans settled near the buried crash site, built a town called Derry, and... you know, King was really fucking blasted on coke and Jack Daniels, he doesn't even remember writing the book. Maybe it's best we just moved on.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Anytime you do something, try to come up with
the "cost of not doing it".
When no answer is readily available,
ask your DBA boss.
All your data are belong to us, boss.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I'd ask my boss for documentation on how much revenue is lost for downtime when, say, a sales drone's desktop is down. Or the mail server is down. Or whatever. If he can't provide that, it is impossible to provide the analysis he's asking for. And that information is not within your ability to determine. If you boss does not grasp this immediately, when you put it in those terms, start circulating resumes, because you work for an idiot. If he does, he'll do his own job instead of passing part of it on to you.
(If he provides that information, then you have what you need.)
Alternately, make them lay you off so you can collect unemployment while looking for a better job.
I worked for a small engineering R&D firm that conveniently ignored federal labor laws. They would *always* give jobs to foreign workers, because they would accept less money. Over the time I was there, I was given more and more responsibility that was above and beyond both my job description and pay rate. Yeah, they refused to give me a salary, I was an hourly worker. So they start realizing that I know I'm more valuable, and they hire a foreign grad student (who doesn't have a work visa mind you) and I'm supposed to train him. I saw the writing on the wall and knew this guy was supposed to replace me. I didn't care much about training him. Sure enough, as soon as he "knew enough" I got canned, with two days notice. Yes, they were asshats, and I was glad to be gone. But I refused to quit because the market for engineering/IT jobs sucks around here, and I wasn't in a position to move. So by firing me I got unemployment benefits to keep me afloat while looking for more work. It took four months before I got something. I ended up getting a job at a large, highly profitable consumer electronics company nearby, make twice the money, have a salary, amazing benefits, and I like my work.
My moral of the story is if you employer is being a jerk, stick it out, make them fire you rather than voluntarily quitting. Its not a good time to be job hunting.
IT serves a noble purpose. Someone has to recommend the good brothels and strip clubs.
You work for a company that has "an IT department" but whose leadership does not know how to value a given employee. It was irresponsible for them to budget for an employee whose role was not clearly understand, and whose performance had no way of being measured.
This might not apply to your specific situation, and is meant more for higher ups, but may be of use, anyway.
If someone asks you why they should have IT, ask them if they have a lawyer either on retainer or employed full time.
Any large company worth its salt will have at least one. So, ask them if they are currently being sued or the government is investigating them. Probably not. Ask them, then, why they have the lawyer. They obviously don't need his or her services right now. They'll respond with something about ensuring the company is following the law, watching for copyright issues, drawing up contracts with terms only lawyers can understand, and so forth; basically, preventative maintenance (that includes the contracts). Point out that they are mostly preventative maintenance, and that the IT department/your job is exactly the same thing: you ensure that operating systems and software are regularly updated ("following the law"), plugging security holes and ensuring any government compliance you might have to follow ("drawing up contracts", sort of), and making sure the company is running at optimal efficiency with regards to technology ("copyright issues", or protecting your stuff).
If it's a small company (as your situation states), they might have a business card or three, but otherwise might not have a regular lawyer; they hire one when one is needed. In that case, IT is probably the same way, best done by some third party that's called in now and then and does a visit once a month to do regular upkeep.
Obviously, suggesting your role should be outsourced doesn't work well for you. So, to justify the maintenance, try to find disaster stories from similar-sized companies (or even somewhat smaller ones) to say "without my work you could be in this same situation". Start with sites like TheDailyWTF, which has a few entries about that kind of stuff, then go to various online tech magazine (a sister site of /., or CNET, or something) and do a bit of research. Then include the amount of man hours you save employees by being on hand to fix problems as they arise, rather than them having to wait for someone to drive in: Average the hours spent fixing something over three months, double it for an external worker (aside from driving, they won't be as familiar with everything and one, so it will take them longer), and show the difference (multiplied by hourly wages) as money you save the company.
Most have already been mentioned, but as the owner of a small business, let me tell you how I value IT:
1) How much would it cost for a technically competent person in the firm to take over your job. Not their salary, but their billing rate x the time to manage and put out fires. This is the "opportunity" cost of that person, and that income is lost when they are non-productive. There will be some initial training costs and some ongoing costs to figure in to "keep up" with the servers. If there isn't a person competent to do your job, or nobody who could be trained to do so (in the boss' eyes - pick the smart alec engineer who always wants manage his own workstation before you claim "nobody") then you have to go to option 2
2) How much would a service contract cost with an outsourcing firm? Count a monthly fee and maybe one escalation per year in excess of that. If you can fix the problems quicker, them realistically estimate the number of additional down hours per year between you and the contract service and multiply that times the billing rates of those who can't so anything without access to the system. You'll need good downtime numbers for that.
Those are the two real costs. I happen to manage my own systems (see smart alec engineer, above) and I can reasonably say that I spend $3000-5000 in otherwise billable time each year on maintenance. The lowest maintenance contract I can get with competent people would likely run me closer to $8k (minimum). For me, the time I lose is only partially worrysome because I don't pay myself anything extra for working 60 hour weeks over 40 hours weeks, and I control my server (yes, singular). It's a cost I choose not to bear. I do, however, pay $1200/year for service on my two large printing machines - those are not worth my time.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
When they ask you what good are you, turn off the servers and go home early. Turn off your cell phone too.
This lesson in life might have negative repercussions, so you might want to update your resume.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I think that too many folks here are overreacting. These are difficult economic times. If you are not justifying your job, and selling that justification before trouble hits, then you might find yourself on the street. Better to brush up on selling yourself before things get bad. Fortunately, you have a boss who is watching your back. When trouble comes calling, he'll have your prepared. I do IT support. What I do is akin to oil in an engine. With me, everything runs smooth. Without me, things can crunch to a halt FAST. - You intervene while troubles are minor, preventing problems from cascading from small issues to big issue. - You can do things quickly where untrained people take far longer. In one day, you can help eight people who would use eight hours of their time being non-productive. Non-productive people start dragging in more people, which amplifies the drag on productivity. - Your company has secrets. They need to trust the person with the keys. You can't buy that from a contractor. - Most industrial systems are specific enough that you can't hire any available contractor. You need someone who knows the system to ensure that the system works in a timely manner. For example, Linda the secretary can't print. She talks to another secretary. They then call Bill from accounting who is good with this stuff. Bill's not sure either. $15 hr secretary + $20 secretary + $25 accountant = $60/hour, and the boss gets the report late. You can do the same thing for $40/hour and fix the issue in 10 minutes, allowing the boss to get the report. As someone else said, this is work that needs to be done. Getting rid of the worker who does this will not make the work go away. Any employee can sweep the lunchroom, but not every employee should have full access to the accounting system.
Do this:
think of 5 major risks that you cover, their cost and their probability.
cost of disaster x probability = money you value
add this for the 5 major risks you found and you get your value.
all the best! itza.ro
Setting the value of preventative maintenance is easy. Take the amount of downtime you would expect without your services. Subtract the amount of downtime you typically experience. Now, take the average salary for every person employed at your company that relies on your IT infrastructure. Multiply that by the number of people who rely on your infrastructure. Repeat the same project by how much your work improves employee efficiency. If your optimizations improve productivity for each employee by 5%, you've just paid your salary in any company with 20 or more people. That's how much your worth.
For example. An unmaintained network might experience two days downtime in the course of a quarter. Add to that the cost of bringing in a consultant (say, $150-$300 an hour for 10 hours) to fix it. If you have 20 people relying on your network, and the average salary is $30 an hour, you're saving $6300 a quarter on top of the efficiency improvements.
Maybe you help the CEO with his printer. If you save him an hour of time, how much are you saving the company?
The key to evaluating your worth to the organization is to keep in mind what other people's time is worth. It's easy to justify yourself in that way.
Ask him if he would mind looking after the system and the user requests for a while so you have time to think about the problem. Apparently he has some free time.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
This is an excellent post. Lucm should be teaching IT management courses. I highly suggest that you (the question poster) do some research on the IT Productivity Paradox. There is a great book called "Information Technology and the Productivity Paradox" by Henry C. Lucas, Jr. You can find a copy on Amazon for a few bucks. The examples are a little dated, but the concepts still apply.
Does the boss think Slashdot is just going to read itself? Someone's gotta be on staff to do it.
Trying to calculate Return on Investment for support is a terrible game. It's a cost, pure and simple. Yes, you know and I know that without that support, the business doesn't make money (because nothing works), but it doesn't drive profits.
The problem is, many businesses don't know why they're paying for support, until something goes wrong. This applies particularly to small businesses, as they don't tend to have experience in things outside their core business.
Rather than taking a cost-savings approach, you can take a risk management approach (how much would it cost if these services weren't running and how likely is this to happen, and how long to recover).
Without solid metrics to back this up, this is necessarily a finger-in-the-air approach, but you can get some idea. Take into account lost business opportunity and reputation loss in any final calculations. Then ask, how much is the business paying for this? If they can outsource all of that cheaper (and manage the outsourcing contract), to the same Service Levels you provide then you should find another job.
But you should probably find another job anyway, unless you have some particular attachment to that business.
Both of you take a month vacation. When you get back the amount of money your company lost is how much you're worth ... if it's still there ;)
Not only is this not the "only" way, it not even a very good way in this situation. Metrics are great, don't get me wrong, but they are not very well suited to this task. Problem is, in a small IT shop, while it does show the break/fix and crisis support, it isn't very suited to project and routine maintenance work. There is no easy way to gather metrics in a small company for things like "99.8 uptime of email", "backups and disaster recovery", "keeping automated anti-virus updates working/current", "rebooting that flaky server in the corner every Monday", etc.
If you want to justify your existence, I'd suggest a project program (i.e. MS Project) with a nice Gantt Chart. Start by listing everything that you do routinely every week (e.g. check automated backups - 1 hour, check server logs for errors - 1 hour, weekly IT reporting - 2 hours, etc.) and then list the project you have planned (e.g. install and configure ticketing system - 20 hours, deploy client patches - 4 hours, train staff to use SUM in Excel instead of MS Calc while creating spreadsheets - 160 hours, etc.). Add on to that how much time you spend on client support and begin assigning yourself as a resource percentage to each task (a ticketing system can give you a good idea of how much you and where you spend your time on support).
Personally, I would avoid, at all costs, trying to assign a dollar amount to what I do. Instead, list out how your time is spent and what all you do, then let them decide if they can live without those things. If you really are a asset to the company, it should be obvious.
Ask Stephen King.
There seems to be a certain consensus that you need to polish up your resume, start networking, and applying for other jobs. I disagree that this is a time for that, just based on this. (I do think however, it's better to be doing this at all times, not just because of something innocuous like your boss asking for a business case for your position...dig your well before you're thirsty.)
I think that the best way may be to use the cost of downtime per application, as well as the cost of the loss of productivity in the event of certain mission-critical applications.
An easy way to calculate that would be to take the total amount of downtime the server or application has during the year. If you think that your preventative maint saves about 10% of the downtime, (a realistic, maybe even a low figure,)then figure total current downtime (tcd) = Theoretical downtime (Td) - 10%(Td) then times the amount by how much the application makes the company per minute.
If the application in question isn't a profit center, (such as email,) poll about thirty or forty of the people across the company and find out how much of their day is dealing with email, and if they think that email is an important part of their productivity. Take the average of the amount of pay per minute, times it by their productivity, and then times it by the amount of workers in the company. That should tell you how much the average outage costs the company...
You can apply metrics to pretty much anything... either way, good luck proving your case.
Simple. Send your IT people home for one week of paid vacation.
See what happens.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I was going to type something up but this totally trumps my idea. It's a near-perfect answer. The only thing I'd add is a suggestion for the guy to keep a log book so he can get better data points and make more accurate estimations. Mod up, please.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
...but write it down! A daily progress report of what you did, who you helped, background tasks that people didn't see, etc. Takes about 15 minutes or so at the end of the day and it will make management happy and give you a written record to refer to later, or for any successor/helper to use as well. I instituted this in my last position for *all* my staff because we were perceived as "not managing our time properly." It helps everyone know what's going on and will give those with a poor perception a rather eye opening dose of what you're really doing.
There is a ton of advice around here saying, let something break, and say "see I'm worth that"
Part of IT is that, or course, although that is a bad strategy, because something will break eventually, and you've positioned yourself as the only way to prevent that.
Yes, you should be able to produce data on how much break/fix work you do, and what that would cost if outsourced. You should also be able to make estimates of what downtime costs, and show how you prevent it.
But in a small business, as IT you should be matching IT solutions with business needs. What should make you irreplaceable is your understanding of technical solutions matched to your company's business needs. So you ought to be able to show how YOUR decisions and implementations have improved business practices, and as such helped improve the bottom line.
If you can't do that, then you probably should be replaced.
The definition of IT IS.....(LOL)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
He recently decided to record hours spent on his projects and then evaluate how much time the databases he writes save the employees. Then he translates that into a $ figure. He's asking me to do something similar but I'm kinda at a loss. It seems most of the stuff I do is preventative, IE care and feeding of servers and network infrastructure in addition to all the break fix stuff I do for the user base with their desktops.
Can you not do exactly the same as your boss did -- work out how much time the stuff you do saves the employees?
Think about how much time it would take your company's average employee to fix their own machine etc. Think about how many employees would be affected by a network outage, and multiply that by the time it would take them to fix it if you weren't there.
Translate these into dollar amounts. Voila!
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
I often think the BEST way to justify your position as an I.T. administrator or support type person is simply to take a long vacation.
Remind people what it's like when they can't just pick up the phone and ask you to "come over and take a look at this problem I'm having".
If your boss calls your cellphone with questions, let them roll to voicemail and don't return them for a while.
I guarantee they'll back off on that whole request to "provide a financial justification for your job".....
is the downtime I have heard kicked around from time to time. Probably bogus, but if you find a reputable source and can show your systems are far more robust than that you can justify your keep.
Also estimate employee costs. E.g. average salary employee times 1 hour of downtime.
Also, if your company bills out hourly, each hour of down time can equate to 1 hour of lost revenue times number of billable employees.
It can add up fast.
Your goal should be *zero* downtime.
HTH.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The solution, courtesy of Scott Adams, of course, is to assume that every dollar your company makes is utterly dependent upon your efforts.
(And when I say "dollar", I mean gross revenue, not net revenue. None of the liabilities are your fault. Duh.)
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Answer this question. Are you valuable to your company? If you are honest with yourself and still the answer is yes, please continue. Suggest to your manager that going forward you would like to record your actions, tasks, projects in some form (ticketing system, excel, whatever). Then grade your work as routine maintenance, special project, emergency work, etc. After some period of time you should have a good idea about what you do every week. Solicit bids from contractors, maintenance providers, etc and do some simple math. Keep in mind that in the states, your salary is only about 60-80% of what it costs the company to employ you. Also, refrain from getting into one of those "I've done so much for this company" BS. Most companies are forced to be future thinking, especially in an economic downturn. Talk instead of the future projects you would like to implement to save/earn the company revenue. A quantitative analysis can actually help you determine your worth, and would at least show your manager and the other leaders of your company that you are competent to solve problems and understand business objectives. Oh, and if you find out that you are raping your company and can stomach it, lie through your teeth and hold on for an interesting ride!
It's probably a good indication that your company is looking at downsizing your two man operation. They probably won't understand what you do and how that translates to $$$ until after your gone no matter how hard you try :-)
If they happen to be in that small group that actually understands their own business and what they need, I'd suggest you start with how you keep the systems up and running, and what would happen if the systems started to fail. How much money would you speculate would be lost? If you can't answer that you could state what operations would be stopped due to the systems being out.
(and bugger you less)
Whoa dude, that's one nasty work environment.
When in this position what do you folks usually do?
I take my two weeks of vacation, don't check my email and turn off my cell phone.
That tends to learn 'em.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
I don't even try to justify it anymore. Management doesn't "know what I do", so they assume that I'm not doing anything despite running one of the busiest websites in the area (both front and back ends) and taking care of most of the IT. My job duties include answering phones, customer service, newspaper and magazine print advertising, mass e-mail marketing, and helping/training employees on how to use their computers, software and e-mail systems. All for a salary that pays less than an entry-level secretary. Management has also blown off all warnings about such things as inadequate/non-existent software licenses, non-existent network security, etc. I'm looking for something else to do for a living :P
Take a week off. Both of you.
:P
Come back the next week, see how much the production figures dropped, then say "That's how much we're worth."
In terms of units or moneys, can't be those results.
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
Hire a consulting firm to come in and justify your workload. They will do a study for a couple months and move your boss out of the DBA role and tell him to focus on 'management' things, like having you set goals and do meeting agendas and other things that will add about 20% overhead to your job. Since you're the only other IT employee, all the other stuff is already assigned to you. When they are done increasing your workload, they will take what they've done to management and propose they do the same for all the other departments in the organization. This process will go on for about a year or so during which time workloads will go up, accountability will go up, and moral will plummet. But thankfully the job market is such that many employees will not leave (just yet). In the end, the employees will be more over-worked and frustrated, management will feel as though everyone is working more efficiently, and the consulting company will have made a TON of money. Atleast that's what happened here (the consulting company *is done* next month - but are they REALLY?). My advice, tell your boss to be quiet before he get's more than he bargained for...
Start thinking about disasters that could happen, assign probabilities of that happening (with you and without you), and assign estimated dollar costs associated with recovering from that disaster. Be sure to add in unlikely scenarios (fire consumes everything) and likely scenarios (someone breaks a server). These are the risks. Each risk will have two probabilities: one given that you are not working for the company preventing things, and one given that you are. Now, for each risk, estimate what it would take to recover from it, and how much that would cost, again given that you are not, and given that you are, working for the company.
Multiply out the probabilities and costs for the "not working" column, and then do the same for the "working" column. The difference between the sums should show that you're actually saving the company money.
Towards the Singularity.
IT computre ergo IT sum. Non Gradus Anus Rodentum!
(I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to prove by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.)
Its easy... Create a simple ticketing system which logs the times the tickets come in, what you did, and how long it takes to complete.
After about two weeks, you should have a few hundred tickets which will account for your work days. Take the total time of completion and compare that to the cost of having geek squad come out. You will find out not only how under paid you really are, but how much of your duties your company overlooks.
I budget for IT resources. Ten years ago, we were paying for 12 full time people at our data centers, but I never saw more than 6 in any month. A few of the guys were definitely worth 2x whatever they were paid. To find out what the other 4 were doing all day, we had them tell us the top 5 things that they did, then had them keep track of how many times they each did it in a week. They complained it would take too much time at first, so I had their boss-boss-boss tell them to do it.
Password resets was by far the largest waste of their time. Users had so many different accounts (20+) and used some of them just once every 4 months for very specialized tasks. Almost 10% of the users called for a password reset of some kind every week. We were running NIS and AD but that didn't help with application logins.
Centralized LDAP and automated password reset tool projects paid for themselves in just a few months. The hard part was in migrating all the web site authentication over and getting support in commercial products. We're still fighting that today, but users are down to 3 passwords at most, which is manageable - in comparison.
Printer Configuration fixes/changes. The 2000 printers were configured individually on each server, manually. Whenever a change was needed, these 4 geniuses would do it on the server that the end user complained about and none of the others. "I can't print to PRT010101 from SRV543." A centralized printer management project with trivial scripting and nightly replication to all UNIX servers ensured that any issue with 1 printer (move/add/change) is mirrored to all the other servers overnight. It took a few weeks to get the 4 "smart guys" to stop editing configs on any server other than the main print config server, however.
No disaster recovery testing except once a year on test DR systems with a 72 hour time limit to get it working or stop trying. We implemented most new projects with a fail over system in an alternate data center. Every week, we'd update DNS and fail over the production systems to the alternate data center. Yes, we could have used global load balancers for a similar end, but CORBA connections didn't like that back then. There was no need for DR testing anymore and we **knew** the DR system was current since we tested it every other week. Everyone sleeps better at night with this one. As systems are upgraded with new hardware, we implement DR/Test systems for them too. There's a big difference between "hoping" and "knowing" DR works. It is also an easy back out plan for any system or application updates.
Basically, figure out where/what you spend most of your time doing then optimize that effort/process. Work to the 2nd and 3rd and 4th most time consuming items and optimize each of those in turn. If you spend an hour a day doing something and can reduce that to 10 minutes, you've saved 4 hours a week so you can do more interesting things. Assume you cost your company $100/hr - that's $400 per week in lost opportunity costs, $1600/month, almost $20k/yr - just this small efficiency improvement can pay back BIG.
There were other stupid things that I can't recall immediately, but it all started with counting the number of password resets. Perhaps you've already solved those items. Perhaps you are still walking to each desktop to work on them? If you could remote into the desktop to fix things, you'd save a bunch of time and limit the "hey, I've got a problem, got a sec?" issue. Or perhaps you have users who install software that break other software. Locking down business computers to prevent stupid user tricks can be a huge time saver.
if preventative maintenance is your role, then important factor to illustrate to them is the cost of not having you.
Build an estimate of the number of outages and their duration on a monthly or annual basis with you adminstering the systems.
Construct another estimate of the frequency and duration of these outages if noone was in your role. Include every little thing that would cause income to stop flowing in or work from getting done. Include things like general system crashes, offline issues, failed backup or lack of backup issues, estimates of unexpeted failures, failures to update systems and drivers, etc. Get every possible loss of revenue generating activity that is likely to occur without you around.
Then compare the difference between these two figures to your salary.
in nearly very situation, the number will clearly illustrate how much money you save the company by performing your duties.
At my job, I don't justify them, at least not the ones that I deal with. Most of them view their customers (e.g., me) as an intrusion on whatever it is that they're doing when they're not doing their job. Since our systems are locked down tighter than...well, tight, we depend on IT to install the software that we need to do our jobs. And I've heard every excuse in the book about why they miss appointment after appointment. As well as every excuse in the book for when they have to make a second or third visit to fix the problems with the installation that took many days and several missed appointments to make.
Now, I'm sure that somewhere buried deep in the vast expanse of my company's IT warren, there are some good operators, techs and engineers. Apparently, though, they aren't the ones who get to work with people. We get to see the bitter, antisocial, disorganized and, yes, often smelly IT "professionals" who give the good guys a black eye.
I'm not demanding...I'm not screaming on the phone that I have to have some piece of software installed this very minute. I'm happy to adapt my schedule to fit theirs. I even understand that things don't always go perfectly...now and then. But if I've got to reschedule an appointment to install Microsoft Office on my locked-down PC three times over the course of a week, if, after the install is done, I have to have somebody come out another two times because Outlook isn't configured correctly and I don't have sufficient privileges to fix it and if that's a common "feature" of our IT department, then something is wrong.
But I'm not bitter or anything. Who knows, maybe all the good IT workers are at HP or IBM or something. Maybe we're just unlucky.
Disappear for 2 weeks. Your boss can tell people that he's only handling "emergency" requests (completely dead computers) until you return. Then they can figure out what you do.
To justify, take a few weeks off and see what happens. The consequences become the answer.
Many companies go through this internally. Especially if you are in an Operations role in IT. You dont write code, you don't create anything new, but you keep the wheels turning. Start to document everything you do. If you don't have metrics for what is being accomplished, how do you show that you did anything. You cant let people assume you are busy, you need to show them that you are doing alot for them.
We have had some WORTHLESS people keep their jobs,and even get promoted because they spent more time documenting what they did than actually getting work done. If you can show that you did 15 service tickets a day, at an average of 30 minutes, they will be able to do their own math to figure out that you are actually doing something.
All your work is necessary for the business to continue. If you weren't there they would have to have paper file systems and a lot more employees. You can cost justify your salary by showing how much it would cost to bring in a managed services company or IT by the hour contractors.
You should know the numbers but never provide them to senior management unless specifically asked for them...and when they do ask for them its a good idea to start updating your resume.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
It pretty much looks after itself, distro is unimportant.
I'd left justify it, like this: the Existence of IT
hilarious!
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
I once took a month long vacation. The boss thought IT was a joke so he didn't have me designate anyone to help with server problems/configuration/desktop support. I was given a raise when I returned. The down side is that if you do a bad job, they'll just fire you when you get back. The bottom line is that people don't realize your worth until they can't do their job because the IT guy is sick/on vacation/overworked. Fortunately where I work, I'm valued and the value I bring to the table is quantified.
This is called the productivity paradox
How do Managers justify the expense of having themselves? All these managers do is to make sure people do their job. Just pay the worker little more money to remember to do their job and the company can cut 50-100k off depending on cost of the manager and give the worker a 5k raise. Simple problem solved.
I had this same issue a few years ago. The company brought in a consultant to do a high level assessment of IT within the company.
The assessment also covered opinions by various staff and management as to what expectations they have for IT, and what IT comparable to other businesses of our size were doing with their departments.
It sure made believers out of management after they saw what it was I actually did. Sometimes bringing in an objective opinion is the only way to convince people to do what's needed to solve problems effectively.
For example, the consultants actually found that my annual budget was 80% below the average budget for the amount of money we brought in. After presenting that information to the President of the company, I had buy in and to this day, still have good support and buy in.
Ask for a month to write your reply.
Keep track of what you do during that month. For each thing, track the amount of time you took, and the worst case cost of that thing not being done at all. Pick some standard metric for both costs. Example: your hourly wage for the stuff you do. Hourly wage * number of hours lost * number of employees affected for each worst case scenario.
There's your answer.
Honestly.
Aside from a fairly large infrastructure with fairly extreme security concerns.
Can an IT department budget ever be justified for a small-medium company? One small IT department could likely administer several small-medium companies.
Are you doing anything the guy next to you can't do if he weren't just surfing the net on the light side of the firewall? How many of those certifications/degrees are you actually using? Are you doubling up on job titles? (You know, do you setup meeting rooms, act as an all-purpose-help desk, sweep the floors ... something to keep you busy yet productive.)
Perhaps I've just had poor experiences with IT departments in general. Though the one at the FFRDC I worked at was top notch, so it could just be a comparative disappointment. Or it's based on the reality that the average company doesn't actually know what an IT department does, or should be doing, so they hire worms that managed to memorize a book long enough to pass a test and then serve to do nothing but screw up and then fix the network in a vicious cycle of fail that somehow serves to justify their existence.
I'm a measure this type of things in a company and I think the best way to go is to measure the value of the time everyone else gains because of your existence. Example: If you help people with IE and they use it to enter other systems, then it's time they gain because they can readily do their jobs. Estimate (just ask) the salary of the average Joe who works there and simply multiply that for all the time they could be without using the system (estimate it again). Adding up every other function you perform and substracting your salary gives your net value... It WILL be greater than zero, probably by a large margin. Hope it helps.
Get a conservative estimate on how long the equipment/services would go without intervention. Say it would last 1000 hours without anyone touching it until it went down. This might not be realistic, but you get the idea.
Then make a conservative estimate on the amount of time to correct the issue. Say 48 hours to bring it back to its previous condition.
1000 hours is roughly 42 days. Found out how much money or funding is made in that time.
This is the hard part, how does your piece of equipment or software integrate to the 'mission'. If it only has a marginal impact on the the company, or has a non-quantitative impact, you will have to justify it in how less effective the company would operate without it, and assign a fair value to it.
Once you have this amount, tell them how much it will cost to be down for 48 hours. You might also add in costs for having outside assistance to get it up in 48 hours.
That amount is what you save them with your preventive measures.
I use this to write EPR's (Enlisted Performance Reports) for my subordinates to highlight how their work has an impact in a dollar amount.
"...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive...it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it..."
While it's tempting to look at the cost of providing the service, that's only half the story. A good IT department is graded as much on what doesn't happen as by the projects they accomplish.
I would start by calculating the downtime costs of the systems you maintain. Start with the direct labor idled, then work out to indirect costs. You'll need help from the business managers, but they will almost always help you because this makes their value tangible too.
You can profitably use this information for deciding where to spend your future efforts, so don't be afraid to get into things like average burdened labor rates, catch-up costs, lost orders, etc.
After you gather that info, start figuring the costs of your average failure. If you really need to be there, that number will be large relative to your cost.
This is way out of the realm of your usual IT work, so it will feel awkward at first. But, if you can get the hang of it, you'll be making much better day to day decisions.
If you get really good at it and can stand wearing the occasional tie, you can be a highly paid consultant.
Play it cool, play it cool, 50-50 fire and ice.
See quickly the management work out how much it's costing them.
That's one of the problems of building 5 nines szstems, the management blood pressure level falls too low. Oxygen starvation to the brain you see. A bit of action solves it all though.
Deleted
Yeah its nice to have a ticketing system, for us we we use an open source ticketing system called - Request Tracker (RT). But there are other great ticketing system as well like OTRS, etc.
I add up the total hours spent doing a project and also add up the total hours it would have taken for disaster recovery. Also informing that for disaster recovery the entire place or portions will not work so it would impede all other jobs. Creating company losses.
Think of it this way--- How much time do you spend preventing something that would cost more time in the long run?
Do you spend 16 hours working on a disaster management and recovery solution, or do you have a consultant come in and
A. let a consultant take 30 hours at $190 an hour (low end $95 an hour) to do the same task?
B. Wait til the shit hits the fan, spend 40 hours in 2 days recovering everything?
C. Call a consultant to come fix it?
It's not exactly how much you need to justify your existence in terms of hours and what you do as it is showing the cost of having someone else come in and do it.
The obvious question on their mind is "can we dump our IT staff and just outsource it?" So figure what you do, and compute how much it would cost the company to outsource the work.
The simplest way to handle all the daily stuff you do is to figure out what sort of a service contract your business would require.
Then factor in the occasional emergency / disaster, and what the additional cost to the outsourced company would be to have them come in under emergency conditions and fix things.
It'd be a bit tricky to try to attack the dollar amount from "what disasters we prevent would otherwise cost", and is simpler to just calculate the cost of the preventative services. How much you'd have to pay your outsourcing people to provide the same protection as you do now.
Don't forget they will need phone support to replace all the heads poking into your office with a "quick question".
Quality outsourced IT is expensive. They'll learn that really quickly. If you lowball your outsourced IT, everyone suffers.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Take a week's vacation and don't answer cellphone or emails.
Once, ten years ago, at a bumblefrick of a job, a manager told me that over the next two months I was going to start training not one, but two different guys to do my job just so that they could keep running smoothly during all the vacation time I take.
Note: I had not missed a day in 3 years, and because my position had been trimmed from the 40 hours a week the guy before me had been doing down to 36, then 30, then 25, I had only ever earned one week of vacation, which was taken in my first year working there. 3 months later, I spent nearly 3 days trying to figure out where nearly $100,000 in product had disappeared to. Turns out that during my brief vacation, the General Manager took over my job, returned things wrong, shipped things to the wrong companies, entered intake in the wrong system.
In those three years, every few months I would get a question about what they could do to free up my time, or what they could "help me" with so that I could have more time for my "more important" duties. If I offered a suggestion, within 2 weeks, another employee was doing it, and we're talking about at most a $1 an hour pay difference (most employees were kept part time), my hours for the next week would be cut by about twice as many hours as it took to do that task, and I would be asked about how happy I must be to have someone "helping me".
Given this pattern, when I was told that my apparently excessive vacation time required training of two extra people, I waited a day then handed in my notice. They didn't even try to convince me to train a replacement. 3 months after I quit, one guy I was supposed to train had taken over my job, and then quit. With 6 months, the second guy had taken over for him, then quit. They had 4 people in my position within a year BEFORE I took over. They had 3 people in my position within a year AFTER I took over.
Last year, I witnessed another boss of mine started the same behavior. Every few weeks, he'd talk to one employee or another, see if that could be moved around, reassigned or given to someone else. Employees who quit were not replaced, work that was shifted to others didn't offset hour reductions both sets of employees would face. Then his second-longest lasting employee was told when she came in that she was going to be training a replacement for her that he had just hired. His intern was told she wasn't in the budget. I left. Two months later his sole remaining employee, his secretary, was told that she was being rented out to another office who was willing to pay essentially 75% of her salary for the privilege of using her 20 hours a week.
Long story short: if your boss is asking you to justify your work, to explain what needs to be done to give you more time... there's some chance he's trying to move you on to higher cost things. There's a better chance they're trying to trim the fat and cut costs.
Part of pricing virtually all techical work is derived on a results-orientated basis, and also supply/demand but that's not the issue here. Simply figure out how damaging it would be to the company if you failed to perform your duties. In other words, how valuable is the information you're charged with administering?
I'm in a similar situation where I am in negotiations with a group of bars to replace their house sound technician. The existing tech is due to retire, and things simply aren't getting done, but the commitment required means the tech cannot be in a touring band or in the union that services the arenas and theaters nearby, which rules out pretty much everyone. They've been paying X amount for slack work for years, so if I'm going to step in and do it right, the least I would demand would be X + 30%, based on how much more effective I'm going to be. On supply/demand terms I've got them by the short-and-curlies, so I might go for more.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
Try going on vacation for two or three weeks and see how many people are tearing out their hair trying to get their computers to function normally when you come back. Something tells me that should answer anyone's questions....
Your Servant, B. Baggins
bring the place to a grinding halt and then ask how much its worth to make it work again. thats how i measure my worth anyway.
The choice facing your company is not the one between having IT support and not having IT support. Nobody in their right mind will seriously ask that question. The choice for your company is between having you on their payroll as a full-time employee, or signing a contract with an IT service company, perhaps one located in India, to do all the IT support work.
As a customer of IT services, I would say that the great value of having an on-site person take care of IT infrastructure is quite simply that you can talk with him. I hope that you talk to other employees, that you listen to their wishes and demands, that you try to find solutions that work well for your company, and that you have people's trust and confidence. This is very important, but difficult to measure. On the long term it ensures that any IT solutions are the right size and the right cost for the business needs, but that is not immediately obvious.
I know from experience that it is extremely important to have someone on-site who actually understands (and shares) the goals of the business. Someone you can have a face-to-face conversation with. You don't really understand the value of that unless you have been forced to miss it. (Of course you can still contract out some of the work.)
The bad news is that this is very difficult to measure. Well, perhaps you could measure the raised blood pressure of workers who have to make do without a local IT contact, and in extreme cases the loss of talented employees who won't tolerate bad IT support. But it will be hard to sell that case to management. Many managers will blithely ignore human factors (don't ask me why) and reduce IT support to a purely technical, almost robotic matter which can be farmed out to India without difficulty. The cost of this kind of policy to the company can be considerable, but it is mostly a hidden cost which doesn't show at all on the budget.
Anyway, my advice, for what it is worth: Don't focus on how much money you save for the company by installing a server or managing desktops. Somebody else is always willing to do it cheaper. Instead, try to get a statement from other employees on how important it is for them to have a good support person they can discuss problems with, and get solutions. And pray that your management has a soul.
Determine approximate non-IT payroll. Use market values if you must. Estimate the time it would take for non-skilled IT folk to fix their problems, deal with virus outbreaks, etc, across all areas. Multiply by wage. This is figure A.
Call around and get some IT consulting rates. Multiply by hours you work. Factor in travel time of consultants, multiplied by wages lost by local employees in this travel time. This is figure B.
Your wage is figure C.
Provide to PHB, including breakdown. If you've done it right, A > B > C. Put a big red circle around the figure for C.
Then get on with your real work.
I think your main objective is to in as simple terms as possible relay the costs to the company of NOT employing you. Compare your SLA/OLA with vendors. Find 3 that are as similar as possible and average the cost of their service. Figure down time cost to the company, response times of you versus a vendor etc. Beyond that you might consider a weekly report that details your major expenditures of time. Use a ticketing type system or log all of your projects/time sinks. Detail everything you do that is more than a few minutes out of your day and present the reports weekly to management.
Mr. Anderson, if you cannot speak?
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
See how many failures you can expect every year, multiply it by the average cost for each intervention on a support contract. If it comes out too low then it's time to change all administrative passwords!
My suggestion is to go on vacation for a couple of weeks. Then ask your boss how much you are worth. Quite simple really.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
He has been tasked with actually budgetizing the IT department. Maybe he needs to know what to expect if your down and out for some reason. There is some truth in these posts, but I think it's kinda like many peoples views that there is some truth to each religeon.
1. Prep your Resume. For real, because even if your boss has the best of intentions, maybe you realize that you could / should be making more. Or worse, you calculate that your worth about 4$/hr.
2. Give the boss what he wants, but be realistic. If a computer smokes, it's 1K to get a new one from dell, and 3 days of lost productivity, or 2K and 1 lost day. (shipping) You back things up because it's industry standard not because you are you.
3. Apply for a few jobs. Don't go crazy, just a job or two a week.
4. The "take a vacation and see what breaks" isn't going to work if your 1/2 way competent. A true sys admin shouldn't be busy, they should be prepared, and preparing. Not the same for a generic IT guy, but still, if your gone for 2 weeks (-or a month or 3)the only issuses that should be a problem would be things like account creation, and joe spilled a cup of joe on his computer and the magic blue smoke that makes it work left with wreckless abandon. Then there is the little how do you fix this formatting issue in Word, etc..
5. Accept the new position, or if you like your job, negotiate w/ your boss for better pay, using your research to justify it.
6. Think of this as an opportunity, not opposition!
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
don't do it for 6 months...
tell your boss you're helping him with his study... you expect to be paid because that is what he asked for. After 6 months go back to work and see what a mess things are and how many problems people are having.
After you talk the secretary down off the roof, and release the guys from accounting from the storage closet, tell your boss you deserve a huge raise.
The last time someone asked me to do what you are doing, I ended up without a job. The company I worked for sold the part of the business that I worked for to another company that was a windows only shop. As a unix admin, I was useless to them. I was out within a month.
just shout "Well-well look. I already told you!! I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people? "
And then there was E
Look at http://www.amazon.com/What-Business-Really-Wants-Collaborative/dp/0750660961/ref=ed_oe_p
Regards, Martin IT: http://methodsupport.com Personal: http://thereisnoend.org
We threaten to delete all backups, publish their private email on the web, disable their laptops and generally sabotage the whole company if they try to kick us out.
I thought all IT guys justified their jobs this way.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Keep track of how many hours you spend computing this estimate, and then report THAT to your boss's boss as an estimate of how much its costing the company to compute this useless number.
That's not really a fair ask on his part.
He's working on projects - that is a constructive effort, and hence costs that have a direct impact on profits or value. You, on the other hand, are working on maintenance tasks. Which don't have direct impact - they are more like insurance than any project work. Everyone in a service company knows that the money is in project work, not in steady state. Keeping the lights on doesn't make you money directly.
There is a lot of bad advice coming in - I would say talk to your boss and ask him how he wants you to value your time. Explain your thoughts around it. Communication is much better than not.
s
If your position was eliminated, there would be no one to care for the technology in the company. Eventually all the machines would fail and business would grind to a halt. You can claim that you are responsible for 100% of the company's gross.
The most intelligent post I have seen on slashdot for a while.
I take a nice long vacation every year or so.
If your workplace is anything like the ones I've been in, nobody truly values your efforts until their machine dies and suddenly nobody's there to fix it on the spot. Annual vacations are that reminder of just how large a portion of the company the I.T. person single-handedly keeps up-and-running on a daily basis.
The Challenge is to quantify what IT does for the other business or profit centers of the enterprise. Figure out what you do for them and how your costs relate to that service and you should be able to explain what it is that IT provides and at what cost.
IF that cost is more than it would cost to get the same quality and service outsourced then don't tell them :)
If its less, ask for a raise.
If its the same, I would suggest seeking opportunities to improve what IT brings to the table.
Bottom line is you need to articulate the pros and cons of an in house IT department in managerial terms and lay it out in regard to cost and congruency with the larger enterprise objectives.
Make sense? I know thats a lot of shoulds and broad statements, but if you can explain your relationship to the enterprise as if you're your own business it translates easily to the bottom line.
Y
I've been a sysadmin in 4 positions over 20 years. If done well, a sysadmin has time to read slashdot, and even the strawbale construction mailing list.
In brief a sysadmin's job is to make it possible for other people to do their job vis-a-vis computers.
There are several ways to look at the value. Some have already come up:
* Comparison to other forms of preventive maintenance.
* Comparison to housecleaning functions, like janitor. (This may not be the comparison you want to raise. May go badly at your next salary review.)
* Comparison to doing the job without computers.
* Comparison to people doing it themselves.
The latter IMHO is the best of the bunch.
* If you can fix a clerk's problem in 10 minutes that would take him all day, then in some sense your time is worth one clerk's weekly salary per hour.
* If you aren't there then you have the issue of the president's secretary has Office 2007, while the VP's secretary has Office XP, and the Mailroom clerk has Office 95 running on a virus infected windows ME box. Nobody can send a file to anybody with any reliability of it being read.
For public values of the comparison, look up Gartner reports. At one point I vaguely recall they said that the cost of having a computer on a person's desk was about 5K per year over and above the cost of the computer itself. The figure was more or less independent of whether the company had an IT department or not. Overall, the money spent on IT was balanced by the increased production of the rest of the people. Now while this may have been true overall, I suspect that it had a large variance and weak correlation.
One of the ways I coped with this was to keep a vi window open on my machine, and I documented my day at a level of detail that showed every time I had to shift modes, answering the phone, fixing hot spots, writing scripts, analyizing log files, trying to prevent problems. After a month they would tell me to stop emailing them 500 lines of detail per day. I would say, "thanks. Now I can get back to work. Writing that email costs me about 1/3 of my day.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
What's the probability of a system breaking? How long will it stay broken without you there? What's the value of that system being operational?
Look at it like an actuary, assess the amount of risk and damage that you handle--and the potential losses to the company should those services ever not be in place.
For a lot of companies, this is a scary thing to face--and the estimates quickly get very high. If all the computers on site became unusable for four hours, not a huge deal--but still a very large financial loss to the company. If you weren't present, outside tech support averages 3-5 business days to address your problem for on-site troubleshooting (wonder how valuable a week's worth of work is for everyone who uses a computer?), or an average of 45 minutes waiting on the phone for a technician, who will then take a minimum of 20 minutes to 4 hours with no guarantee of a resolution.
Weigh that to what you do--prevent exploits, put out fires when they happen (usually within a few hours), and you can start to see how valuable your services are.
For your boss, however, the most useful information would be your estimates of how long the system would keep running without any intervention on your part. Keep in mind that even the simple errors that just require a service restart count.
If you want the actual formulas of how to calculate variations on that to give a very detailed report, look into a Poisson Distribution. Alternatively, you could just multiply the average number of failures per month by the estimated costs of the failures, and that gives a pretty good estimate of how valuable you are.
Here's my job, as an example:
We average failures ranging from simple service outages to cataclysmic authentication failures network wide.
I would estimate that, on average, a service outage results in an aggregate 10% loss of productivity network wide (people not being able to ssh in machines forces them to be on site, a web server outage makes some information unavailable to them). We have 180 workstations that I manage, and roughly 40% usage during work hours (72 people working).
At best, a service outage would take about a week to repair, and average wages of people working are $15.72/hour (average American wages). For 72 people ($27164-$45273, assuming each works 40 hours a week), a 10% loss of productivity for a week amounts to roughly $2700-$4500 worth of lost revenues. These occur at an average rate of 4 per month, totally an average potential loss of $10800-$18100 per month. This assumes an existing contract for on-site support in the event of a failure, with a promised response time of 3-5 business days.
That is the minimum, of course this could be minimized with a shorter-response time in the contract, but the contract would also dramatically increase in price.
For the maximum potential loss, namely, a total failure of a network service, we ought to assume a next-day contract with out-side technical support. Worse-case scenario is having the failure at night before the business day start, and the best is having it at the end of the work day. For this, all employees have a 100% loss of productivity, ranging from 1 hour, to 8 hours of lost work time ($1131-$9054). Including automated systems that generate revenue, each of those values require roughly $250/hour added on making the potential loss for a network outtage $1300-$11000. These occur on an average of once every two months without maintenance, and increase in frequency if left untreated. The initial cost, if maintenance were stopped today would be estimated between $600-$5500/ month, with an increasing rate of failure. After a year's lack of maintenance, the failure rate would likely increase to once or twice a month, making the expected losses $1300-$22000/month.
Lastly, we must consider the cost of exploits and failure to patch systems. Should all of our companies financial data be made public, we could project an estimated loss of $300,000 in privacy suits, and a loss of
It's not about what you do, but what you document, that really matters. Document every thing you do in a ticketing database. Then you can run all sorts of reports and you can go back to management and have something tangible to show them.
For instance, at my job, my boss uses the data from our ticketing software to justify hiring employees or consultants, secure funds for training, tools, software, etc. It's quite effective. You have to speak management's language: numbers.
IT's justification is that it is required to solve problems arising from the existence of, well, IT.
Like many have proposed, alternative costing combined with risk analysis would bring insight into the benefits and value of your work.
Where I last worked, there was only 1 question asked. How much will it cost us to be seen on the front page of every newspaper for any security breach.
Just make sure that you allow users to add replies/comments to cases and to reopen them if they have not been satisfactorily resolved.
If the system does not allow this then only half-solving the problems is rewarded by metrics showing lower response times and a higher number of solved problems.
My experience with the help desk at work leads me to believe people will abuse this.
what the end-users will miss most is someone they know and trust. it takes time to build trust. having someone who knows and cares makes all the difference.
Other solutions include:
Just put figures on all the alternatives and back them up by examples in other departments or studies found on the internet. If you cannot put figures, try to come up to a sensible figure and explain your calculation. Go straight to the point and avoid details that nobody (but yourself) cares about.
Put also previsions for the next year and easy to understand graphs, a plan for the next business year and ideas of what could be bought/invested to improve the cost efficiency of yourself and your boss.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
Ask the manager-who's-trying-to-make-you-to-do-his-job for a private face to face talk, bring up the contentious subject and say "I'm sorry but you are requesting a task which clearly falls outside of those outlined in my contract, if you would like to encourage me to perform tasks of management nature, feel free to renegociate my contract."
If your contract does include management tasks then i have no more advice for you, you're on your own.
A novice asked the master: ``In the east there is a great tree-structure that men call `Corporate Headquarters'. It is bloated out of shape with vice presidents and accountants. It issues a multitude of memos, each saying `Go, Hence!' or `Go, Hither!' and nobody knows what is meant. Every year new names are put onto the branches, but all to no avail. How can such an unnatural entity be?"
The master replied: ``You perceive this immense structure and are disturbed that it has no rational purpose. Can you not take amusement from its endless gyrations? Do you not enjoy the untroubled ease of programming beneath its sheltering branches? Why are you bothered by its uselessness?''
After 40 years in IT, I know the answer to this one: MSU. Gets you back quickly to the real work, and they'll never know the difference (or, probably, care).
I think this is the best response to the question. Too many decisions in IT are made based on perceptions (especially when it comes to how "simple" a task is, or how much time is spent on tasks and projects). And rarely does a non-technical person have any idea how much work it takes to make computers work!
Metrics are the only way to get a true picture of where resources are getting spent. Once you have the metrics, not only will you be able to justify where you time goes, but also perhaps where changes can be made to save time and money.
Also, when you know how much time is spent on what, you can then put a dollar value on it based on having to outsource that work. As others here have said, don't forget to factor in the cost of your employees sitting around waiting for that outside contractor to fix the issues.
When gathering the metrics, it's important to log EVERYTHING that you do. It's a real pain to log ever move you make all day, but it's necessary if the metrics are going to mean anything. You might also want to consider setting a minimum work ticket time, something like 5-10 minutes. Even if someone calls you with a simple question (that you can answer right then over the phone), you still have to factor in the time to answer the question, the time to write up a work ticket for the call, and the time to get back on track with whatever it was you were doing before getting interrupted by that phone call.
And I would not work in a company asking me such a thing, unless it was to get started a new IT department.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There are alot of variable and depends on the type and levels of service you actually perform and provide. Overall it could be called metrics.
First this I would do is keep a diary of what you do (date/time reported, time in, time out, type of job, and LEVEL of emegency ie:CEO laptop-ASAP, CFO account issue-Ugent, new hire setup-2 days etc...) Using a break-fix or job tracking type of software (punch clock) will help.
Next is to figure out How much inconvence each of the types of job are and or cost to the business. I an employee is sitting idle cause can't use his computer (even though he could do something manually) is a big inconvence and cost the company productity - say about TWICE to THREE time the average salary of the employee (the company pays more that just say your 15.00/hour wage - like insurance, Payrol taxes, computer leases, and other benifits etc...). You could even figure out levels for like office vers CEO - but most likely not Urgent is always worth MORE than non-urgent.... Multiple people down cost (ie Server or Router problems) company more and there are thing we can't control or don't fix our selves - telco interconnect/internet lost etc.... (some contruction dug up a line or two on a few occation here....)
That then SHOWS how much VALUE you save the company.
Then there are other thing like more ADMIN style stuff - creating new employee accounts and installs and decoms and maybe a little bit of programing etc... all that can be equated to time and cost as well - Again time you input - is MUCH more that your hourly salary. Possably 3 to 5 time your salary....
That is the VALUE of what you inputed into the company.
However you have to be carefull as you ALSO have to account for your DOWN time as well (possably 2-3 time your hourly salary) - say ADMIN time / Clean up / prep time etc...
Regarless of how you setup your own metric or measurement - your "Value" will vary - possably ALOT (I know personally). It SHOULD not be used to say - well you did not do hardly anything today/this week/month... cause it should look at how well your performing and possably explain where your bogged down/over whemed and maybe need help or when you have free time to help maybe other people like the boss etc...
Your boss is on the right track. You have to be able to demonstrate your value to any company and IT is usually not the money maker unless your business model is based on online sales. So look at your tasks proactively, instead of preventative (the "good offense" approach).
Are you responsible for the security of the data? Then what would be the cost to the company if the data leaked out? Think in terms of competitors, public image/trust, the privacy of customer records, and need to keep internal financial records private from viewing to all but authorized personnel. Who is responsible for making sure those things don't happen? This will be a mostly qualitative analysis on your part.
Lastly, don't expect to be able to do this analysis in a week or two. A thorough analysis will probably take a least a couple of months. Are you responsible for the integrity of the data? What would be the cost of records in your boss's db becoming corrupted? Who makes sure backups are readily available? Again, a qualitative analysis unless the db is a money maker, in which case you should be able to come up with some hard cost value.
Are you responsible for the availability of your data? What would be the cost of a prolonged power outage? Is there a sales server that actually makes money taking orders? If so, what is the dollar value of the orders lost if the server goes down for an hour? This would be a more quanititative anlaysis than the others.
You kind of get the idea, but overall it is very difficult to come up with a pure quanititative analysis of your worth, but you can get reasonable values to replace the hardware and estimate the time to restore. Don't get wrapped up in the employee vs. contractor discussion. There's pros and cons to both and neither have any greater weight than the other in a vacuum. It depends on the needs of the company. Your mission: Document everything you do to protect the company proactively and convince them they never want to find out what would happen if you weren't there watching out for them.
...overhead. Some companies spin off their IT departments into a subsidiary since there's no way to justify the overhead of IT or quantify IT's contribution. Likewise, an IT "department" will eventually find themselves fighting for funding just to get the bare essentials needed to keep up with capacity and user requirements.
As a subsidiary, you can charge a fixed amount per desktop managed, which turns you into a profit center. This allows you to lease equipment and keep it new. When you are done with lease, send it back and get a new replacement.
You use a combination of ticketing and time sheets to track your time. This turns you from overhead to profitable subsidiary. Your budget problems also more or less disappear provided you get your pricing in "the zone" ; ) This enables you to get the latest gee-whiz technology for your company and make your contributions a lot more visible.
It's hard to not justify a profitable IT subsidiary company. Just remember to keep it competitive or you may find your parent company's departments going somewhere more affordable to get IT support ROFL. This can be partially prevented with a carefully written network policy, but you need to be reasonable because other people need to run and budget their departments too. If you squeeze them too hard they'll be *forced* to look elsewhere.
In this manner if your parent company is expanding, so will your revenue and budget as you add more users, enabling you to hire more IT people as needed and justified by your revenue.
I've been in 2 companies that used this model and when they made the switch they went from being under funded and budget starved to getting the money they needed to make the client (non-IT) happy and being able to afford necessary staff.
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Show how all those schmizafaloongs you perforborizatle consistently save the company from exploding on a daily basis.