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

Writing your own eulogy

[Hadlock]

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.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[rdeml]

Take a 2 week vacation and see if everything still works afterward. Your job is to keep everything working. If everything works without you, then you are not needed. If, however the boss balks at 2 weeks without IT support, you are vital.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[Lord_Frederick]

Exactly. If you are just doing generic IT stuff, then a small company may very well be better off with some sort of maintenance agreement instead of keeping you. Your boss has already realized this and is probably already soliciting bids. Sorry.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[mcgrew]

Hmmm... It's been a few years so I don't remember where I read this, but if you become irreplaceable you should be fired - because some day you may quit, retire, die, or be incarcerated.

No company can afford an irreplaceable employee.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[Hairy Heron]

If, however the boss balks at 2 weeks without IT support, you are vital.

Or they just let you know when you come back that you are being let go and replaced by someone else who was around to do work for them. Ultimatum stuff like you're advising the person to do never works like people think.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, most of the companies that thought that way are now really in a bind.

I've seen many irreplaceable people fired as a stop-gap measure to make sure they they were replaceable. Sometimes this meant hiring them back at much higher rates, but mostly it meant watching key projects die, losing status in the customer base, and generally suffering without resolution. In the companies that couldn't bear the suffering, they closed product lines or went out of business. The ones that could afford the suffering shrunk.

Certainly companies can afford an irreplaceable employee in the short term, because irreplaceable always means irreplaceable in the short term, in the long term the employee's key role with the company will eventually diminish naturally.

Funny thing was, I was irreplaceable at a job I had a few years back, mostly because no matter how hard I tried to get rid of a lodestone of a project, nobody cared to know anything about it. No matter how hard I tried to get the resources to improve it, nobody cared to allocate a dollar to do it. Eventually, I quit (as did my boss) and about six months later I received an angry phone call from my previous employer.

They had misplaced the documentation on how to install the product, and were demanding that I walk them through a 2 day installation procedure on the phone, right now.

I told them I'd be happy to come back to install the product after hours, provided I'd be paid. I indicated that I would also train anyone to do it, allow them to observe me installing it, and re-document the necessary steps. They declined to accept me back even before a price was discussed.

I was weak; eventually I told a good friend a the company how to do it, and walked him through the critical steps over the phone over a few day period. Guess what, they let him go too!

Never underestimate how misunderstood a business mantra can be. I think the moral was supposed to be: reduce risk by distributing knowledge. Add a few assumptions, that people with critical knowledge only have it because they are uncooperative, that the knowledge isn't really critical, etc. and you get fire your experts.

Posting as Anonymous Coward to protect the guilty and innocent alike. They might change their minds one day!

first things first

[gEvil (beta)]

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.

Imagination

[sam0vi]

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

Quantify Work

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Compare with the present, not the past

[mangu]

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.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[DavidD_CA]

That's awfully subjective.

A well-chosen outside consultant or IT shop can do just as well, or better, or worse, than a permanent IT position.

I'd even go so far as to say that, unless you've got 4-5 IT full-time people on staff, hiring an outside company will often give you better support, more reliability, less downtime, and be overall cheaper.

One reason is that with only 1 or 2 IT people on staff, you have a very limited pool of knowledge and experience. An outside company, however might have 5-25 people who are often just as experienced or more.

Another reason is that employees take vacations, but hired companies do not. If your server goes down while one IT guy is in the Bahamas and the other one is out sick, what happens? A well-chosen IT firm won't have this issue.

A third reason is buying power. If you're ordering 20 machines from Dell, you'll get a nice discount. But if you're ordering those machines from an IT shop that orders 100s of machines a month, you'll usually see a nicer discount.

To say that an internal IT person knows your system better is somewhat true, but if outside consultants are the ones that put it in there's a pretty good chance they'll know it quite well.

Just like outsourcing marketing, human resources, plumbing, accounting, and anything else, there is a very obvious benefit for small organizations to outsource IT. And just like those other examples, there comes a point where hiring full-time employees makes sense.

One question ...

[gstoddart]

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

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[Cryonix]

I used to be the sole person in an "IT department" for a small company (>15 computers). I was constantly bombarded each month with requests for justifying my time billed to the company. I eventually had enough of being looked at as a burden to the company rather than an asset. I began classifying the tasks I was responsible for and how much time I spent on each task over a 6 week period. (Tech support, web design, application development & maintenance, software support, pc repair, etc.) After researching the cost to outsource each of those tasks, I extrapolated that to cover a one year period. The cost of my yearly pay was well under the cost of having someone else come in to do those things. I ended up giving monthy reports on where my time was being allocated, but the overal view towards my position was changed.

Start printing copies of your resume at work

[topham]

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.

Re:leave

[Anonymous Coward]

Odd, can't login.

I recommend leaving as well. I am the founder and CEO of a Chicago-based IT firm, and we quit immediately if our labor hours are questioned. One of our largest customers asked us to defend our hours last year (a $300,000 contract for 2 employees), and I gave them our 30 day notice. They let us go immediately.

Within 3 months they were calling us back. We refused without a 50% increase. They refused. As of today, we have the same 2 employees back at that job at $430,000 a year.

If you are undervalued, leave. Always leave. And don't go back until you are overvalued.

Justify maintance

[r2rknot]

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.

Start with downtime cost

[stargazer1sd]

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.