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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?"
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.
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
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.
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.
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.