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

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[martyros]

That's a complex piece of accounting, and it's not a job for an IT worker to be asked to do. If you're making the IT worker spend time to justify their job financially, you're not being a very efficient company.

I think this is the most insigtful comment so far. Why the heck should they rely on the assessment of an IT guy? That's not his job. He doesn't had any training, expertise, or experience. Are they going to fire him if he puts the value too low? What do they do when they find out he was wrong then?

Any reasonably sane person in this situation would find out how much his salary is, and then make up a bunch of plausible numbers that is at least 2x that. (Given that he's been asked already, saying "You really need to ask a business productivity expert about that" probably isn't going to get him very far unless he has a particularly good relationship with his superiors.)