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?"

Comments

5 reasons for any business decision

[prgrmr]

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?

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[max99ted]

I've been doing on-call support for years now and I've found the best way is a subscription service - basically a monthly amount so that I'm available when they call. I service primarily dental offices and base the amount on number of workstations and servers, what applications they are running, and also what type of response time they are looking for. Someone is physically onsite at least once a month regardless - this is what some other small IT shops miss with these types of arrangements. Clients don't like getting a bill and never seeing a warm body onsite.. no matter how good your remote support setup is.

Emergency onsite calls are charged extra at a fixed rate - most other stuff can be handled during the monthly visit and/or remotely. Very few clients want an 'all-inclusive' arrangement where they pay a fixed amount for 'unlimited' service.

We used to do break-fix but found that it was much harder to retain clients long-term. Billing is a pain and sometimes difficult to justify to the client. We also found that the key to staying afloat was to 'cull' your client list every year - drop the 10% that never pay on time, are a pain-in-the-ass, and so on. This frees up time to find clients that you do want to keep.

Keep in mind that my experience is limited to SMALL businesses - biggest client has 45 stations and 3 servers.