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

Another question is

[Anonymous Coward]

How to spelling a headline?

Don't take technology for granted

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[samkass]

I'm not sure that's a valuable analysis. The company could hire a group to come in and install desktops at every desk with the latest Office software, networking, servers, and even training to use them. Then they pack up and go home. The office hums along great for a little while but as the technology breaks down, reaches capacity, etc., things gets increasingly worse.

What you're trying to do is measure the cost of the "things gets increasingly worse" vs. the cost of having an on-site IT expert maintaining things.

For that, you need to start looking into failure scenarios and risk assessment. 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.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[DrLang21]

Estimate the price of the time saved. When you have to be deployed to fix someone's desktop, you can usually assume that it would have been down for a day or more otherwise. That's 8 to 10 hours of their time, plus other people's time if anyone else is relying on their work. Manufacturing is usually a very fast paced world, and a day lost by someone usually translates to large losses. You should also consider a daily cost savings to preventative work. When you keep the servers running, what would be the likelihood of a major failure without that maintenance and what would an entire hour of server downtime cost the company. Imagine that everyone in the company has just had their productivity cut to 33% or less. In a moderately sized manufacturing facility, that can add up to millions within a day.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[moderatorrater]

If he's the maintenance IT guy, he needs to take a different approach. He should show the costs with no maintenance IT guy, contracting out to another company, and then show his costs. If he's busy all day, it's guaranteed that he's saving them money. Contracting out will get the job done in the same amount of time, it'll just cost a lot more money. With nobody there, everything he deals with will still have to be dealt with, it's just that it'll have to be dealt with by people slower than he is and not as good at the job.

Overall, he should be able to show at least 40% savings over contractors and 70% savings over everyone dealing with it themselves. Almost everyone here's worked at a place with too little IT support and seen how it kills productivity, so this should be a fairly simple exercise. I suspect that his supervisor will have something to add to his presentation to cater it to the executives, but if the executives don't immediately see the merit of the report, then they would be hostile towards IT anyway and there's probably nothing that can be done.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[petes_PoV]

But you assume all the processes that IT facilitates are worthwhile.

To follow up on your example of handouts for meetings. Would that meeting take place without IT? What would be the consequences (either: (a) people get more real work done, or (b) something important gets missed and the efficiency of the business drops a little).

Same with email: if the IT dept. wasn't there to facilitate it, more paper memos would be sent, but since these take more effort, the number would be fewer than the number of emails - and they would only be sent (a) when really necessary and (b) to those who really needed them.

However, no IT people doesn't mean no IT. Where there was real value, some people would use PCs, printers, spreadsheets and the like. it's just that they'd have to work it all out for themselves and therefore consider if the pain was worth the gain, rather than having some IT minion do all the labourious stuff for them.

What we have with IT is frequently a case of work expanding to consume the resources allocated to it.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[Trojan35]

You guys are thinking like IT people, not management.

When management asks you this, they're really asking "What in your job can we get rid of so you have time to do things we think are more important?"

They want improvements, not for you to defend the status quo. Identify frivolous things you maintain, ask that you eliminate those to work on new projects. Use your presentation time to show how the new projects will make the business more productive.

You justify your job by proving you are valuable, not that every task you perform is valuable.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[DrLang21]

For that, you need to start looking into failure scenarios and risk assessment. 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.

Sadly, this is often the position that IT finds themselves in as less insightful business types often only look at them as a non-producing cost to the company. In this guy's situation, I would suggest that his manager should be attempting to do this. This is especially important when an under-appreciated department begins to find themselves to be understaffed as the company grows.

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.)

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.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[michrech]

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.

Not true. Many companies I've done work for hired me to come in and set it all up. The people that make this type of decision usually view a computer like a VCR -- they believe that, once setup, it should "just work" and not need any maintenance/etc. Plus, there's always "that guy" in the office who setup/built/installed "a computer for his buddy/mom/dad", and is obviously an expert. This guy will ultimately get tasked to do much of the work (I've seen this more times than I have fingers/toes).

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.

Again, this isn't what would happen. Every desk would have it's own printer (occasionally, there might be a network available printer a guy like me might have setup). They'll just print however many copies of whatever it is they need to distribute to people. If they also have an office copier, they'll print one copy and then make as many as they need at the copier. (You can use this paragraph as an answer to your "spreadsheet" excuse, also)

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.

You must live in a weird area if you've seen people do this. What I've seen are companies having their employees either sign up for a "company address" via hotmail/yahoo/google/whatever, or using their own personal accounts. They also install some common IM (MSN, Yahoo, AIM being the most common) to communicate with each other, if they have separate offices.

As far as "presentations" go -- Any companies that actually did this usually have a portable LCD projector, screen, and some sort of laptop (but this has been rare -- most of the companies I've worked for just don't hold these types of meetings). This type of hardware is fairly cheap, can be "locked in a closet", and doesn't require professional (or permanent) installation. To create the presentation? They'll just use one of the office computers mentioned earlier to create it. No Kinko's, no laying everything out by hand, etc.

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.

Billing/reporting? Peachtree/Quickbooks. Run, of course, from the previously mentioned office computers.

Out of curiosity, were you intentionally trying to make this out to be as difficult/primitive as possible? Would you happen to work for a company that makes infomercials? Reading over your post, I was reminded of that stupid infomercial about stacking tupperware where the lady opens her cabinets, starts flailing her hands about inside the cupboard, causing all the existing plastic-ware to fall onto her head. Sounded *exactly* like how you tried to describe how business would work without an IT person.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[liquiddark]

Most of the time contracting out won't get the job done in the same amount of time anyway. Most contracting businesses have large evaluation/estimation stages for anything more significant than "install a new router".

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[ichigo 2.0]

I think you're taking the wrong angle. Obviously having an IT-department is cheaper than doing everything "the old way", but what you really have to consider is the alternatives to having an IT-department.

Outsourcing IT-services is an reasonable alternative for organizations that aren't large enough to justify dedicated personnel and hardware. There are of course some cons like no control over downtimes (which is why you don't outsource to some one-man sweatshop that is one heartbeat away from IT meltdown) and slower reaction times unless the company is located nearby, but all in all it is a good idea for smaller companies.

I realize now that this probably isn't what the person asking the original question wanted to hear. My advice would be to estimate roughly how long it would take and how much it would cost to recover from e.g. a server meltdown (which your actions of course prevent), and then calculate how much income would be lost because of it. You could do something similar to other aspects of your work.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[Atrox666]

Well a stitch in time saves 9 is the old saying.
That would make 89% reduced wastage.
Sure it's a fictitious number but almost all business metrics are made up numbers.

In reality there are some metrics on how often outsourcing fails..they were in the mid 80s last time I checked.

Another idea would be to bring in IBM to do this analysis for you..they are happy to do it for you at a cheap price and you get some really neat charts and crap for the management types to jerk off to. When they are done the analysis the answer is always the same .. YOU NEED TO GIVE US MORE MONEY. Once they see how they would be treated by a company like IBM and how much money they would want for their piss poor service then the management types will shut their idiot mouths and let you do your job.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[giorgiofr]

then they would be hostile towards IT anyway and there's probably nothing that can be done

And that's precisely the situation I find myself in right now. I reached the conclusion that nothing can be done and, honestly? I stopped caring. But that's not the way I should be working.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[LandDolphin]

I worked for a company that out-sources it's IT department. We had a on-call guy who would normally be there within 1-2 hours (Faster if an emergency) to fix problems if they happened.

It turned out to be cheaper then doing it ourselves. They charges a pretty penny when they had to come, but they did not have to come often enough to justify a 40/week position with the company.

Plus, it did not hurt that there will knowledgeable people, like myself, that would look into fixing problems before we called the out-sourced IT company. (Desktop problems, not server. Only the on-call IT department were allowed to touch the servers. So any errors coudl not be blamed on company staff)

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[asylumx]

Let's not also forget the time he's being paid to waste on this analysis that the business certainly has (or should have) people who are far more qualified to do. Our R&D department is perfectly capable of maintaining their own servers and to some degree even writing their own database systems -- however, our IT guys can do it better and faster AND the R&D guys can spend their time researching and developing new products. The only ones that lose in this scenario are the HR folks who are trying to keep headcounts down, and who cares about them anyway?

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[LandDolphin]

You can have all of the benefits of IT, without having a full IT department.

Hire an IT company to set you up and keep up wit the on-call maintenance. That way you can run your company as if you had a full time IT staff, without the full time IT staff.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[ArsonSmith]

Exactly. Showing that every task you perform is valuable is just making you a tool. Showing that you will provide increasing value with projects and ideas will show you as a valuable employee.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[Bandman]

I agree that a full-on financial assessment isn't the IT workers' responsibility, but a rough estimate isn't out of the question. I do agree that it is probably wasted time if the person is spending any considerable time on it.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[twilightzero]

Someone please mod this up. This is exactly the type of points that need to be calculated and emphasized. I've been in this same position, more or less, and ended up determining that this is the REAL value of IT expertise and preventative maintenance to a company.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[Bandman]

I'm not attacking what you say or what you do at all, so don't take this that way, but your comment really makes me think about why there are unions in other industries.

If there were an IT workers union, you wouldn't have been allowed to fix minor issues, as I understand it. I've got to wonder why IT has never unionized.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[Bandman]

I'm not sure I understand your comment. What do you mean that nothing could be done? About what, specifically?

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[electroniceric]

For that, you need to start looking into failure scenarios and risk assessment. 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.

Well, yes and no. If you're looking for a precise, quantitative answer on risk management, yes, that is in-depth and involves specific skills. On the other hand, a lot of understanding of risk can be gained by simply doing some brainstorming to gain a general understanding of the risks.

To the poster: try getting together with your boss (and maybe a "friendly" from accounting or elsewhere in the company) to brainstorm a thorough list of risks associated with non-care and non-maintenance of the company's IT systems. Then go through and write down mitigations to these risks. Many you're already doing, some you may not be. Don't bother with anything quantitative - just get down a reasonably good person-to-person understanding of these risks. That list alone ought to be a strong defense of your job - it should be very evidently that the cost of doing nothing is much greater than the cost of paying you. And the list of un-mitigated events provides clear direction for evaluating and prioritizing future sysadmin needs.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[adelgado]

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.

Probably no Zip either, friend...

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[Bandman]

Out of (professional) curiosity, how did that wind up? Did it change their perception of your value?

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[edis]

Exactly the model, I was to suggest. Essentially, financial evaluation can effectively boil down to the market costs of such services - that is, them being outsourced. Additionally, you can incorporate into the view comfort of having employee always in "has arrived" state (most expensive reaction), as well as him being better informed of the specific environment of tasks, workflows and equipment, than any newcomer.

To justify as detailed picture, one would register jobs and time spent at them for a while, and compare that to market offers of outsourcing. At the very basic comparison, that could be assuming, that there is always something to do at workplace, thus comparison would be directly of employee costs versus outsourcing of similar quality per hour.

As noted elsewhere, there is quality thing, like possibility of more care and preventiveness or solving current users' problems by IT professional, rather than himself struggling, which would be not achievable on outsourced model, as calls on need basis tend to eliminate quite some of that.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[LandDolphin]

No insult at all there.

Your right, at the time was was not in IT. I had the background/skill to do it, but I was employeed in a different department. So, if there was an IT union (and I was in a Union State)I would not have been allowed to do what I did.

This is the benefit and folly for Unions.

The IT guy likes it, it provided more jobs and job security. But everyone else hates it because now they have to wait for the IT guy to come down because someone unplugged their monitor, or some other small issue that should be handled by anyone before even the inhouse IT guy is called.

There is probably a happy balance in there somewhere.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[Fred_A]

Seems like a lot of work. He could just show up at work for a week and let everything go to hell by doing basically nothing and then check with accounting to see how much the company has lost.

The delta between their usual profit and that amount is how much his position is worth to the company.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[HoboCop]

Yeah, also keep in mind that for every one of you that fixed a few things, there was likely another non-IT staffer who managed to make it worse and cause the external guy to spend a lot more time than he would have if the problem had been left alone.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[theJML]

I'd have to say that this is correct. Management is looking to trim people. This happened where I work twice now in the 3 years I've worked there. We used to have an IT Guy, then they decided that we could all just fend for ourselves. We're a software development company, and we're 60% engineers, 40% management. We've all ended up setting up/patching/maintaining our own desktops as well as network server roll-outs and such.

What I'm trying to say is that we've had to fight to keep things up and running so long, that we all end up doing all maintenance on everything in the infrastructure ourselves. If I'm trying to code something and the cvs server goes down, I may be the one that has to fix it this week, it could have been someone else last week. Or the ftp, or e-mail, etc... but you have to question how much more valuable our time is spent elsewhere, like doing what we are paid for. You may want to take that into effect. If these updates/fires are only able to be put out by other people, how much work would they NOT be getting done because of it? a few hours of network downtime could result in thousands or more of lost revenue! Missed deadlines/code drops, missed operturnities, etc...

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[mabhatter654]

OK, I think you're on the right track. The question is what does the company think IT should be doing? Do they even have a plan or just want to beat somebody up over costs?

I think IT is one of those Maytag repairman type positions. The idea is to work yourself out of a job doing easy stuff by increasing reliability, automation, documentation, training, etc. The real trouble with IT is that managers are not really taught to develop it or think about new tools to develop and then nurse them along. IT is part building maintenance, digging in dirt, and part forward looking business strategy, planning the company future. I think that puts off many managers that like neat boxes where employees are "less than" or "more than" other employees and IT people straddle all sorts of business lines.

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[libkarl2]

For that, you need to start looking into failure scenarios and risk assessment. 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.

BANG!

It is like asking a city fire department to produce a dollar figure on how much collateral fire damage and property loss they prevent in their district per year, compared to simply letting the fires burn. The correct answer is: "All of it".

Re:Don't take technology for granted

[im_thatoneguy]

It's unfair but it also has to be done unless you trust your manager to fully understand the risks.

If the company management isn't IT centric they may not understand the costs and risks of switching to a contract service.

As an employee however you can be expected to clearly itemize how you spent your time if requested so that the management can do those risk analysis.

"What do you do in an average month? What additionally happens bimonthly? Annually?" Give them a punch list of what you do and then let them decide how much of that can be replaced by replacing faulty systems outright instead of fixing them or replacing some functions with part time.

We have 4 computers per person at our company and no IT department full time. Our on-call contract service is more than effective enough for the cost. However we'll all pretty technically savvy. Our software mostly just works all the time. A lot of people seem to be ignoring the option that this slashdotter might run the quick numbers and find out he's not worth the cost.

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

[Ethanol-fueled]

Ha ha! Well, shit, since TFA is titled "How do you justify the existence of IT" the answer is simple:

Answer that question for them and just walk out. Let 'em run a few days without an IT department. Come back in a week and witness the piles of help tickets, flaming servers, half-dead employees feeding on dead bodies, confused employees who don't know where their internets are, the quizzical look of managers gathered 'round a UNIX box with question marks floating over their heads, etc.

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

[tcc3]

Better off does not = cheaper. Ive seen a lot of small offices, law firms, etc spend too much money for lousy service and poor response time from 3rd party support.

May not always be the case, but depending on what he does this may not be a good idea.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[Omega996]

i hate to agree with thread parent, but i think he/she's right. the last time i worked at a company that did this, they terminated roughly 31% of the IT staff after the whole thing.

The only way I can think of that you could realistically show how much money you're saving is if you figure out how much money the company would lose per minute/hour/day/whatever that the services you maintain weren't provided.

i know it sounds glib, but what you should be doing is looking for another job. Any time someone wants you to 'justify' your time spent, that means that they're looking for ways to cut costs, and that you (or a portion of your department, in a larger environment) are on the short list. Just be prepared.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[poetmatt]

Yeah, give it a week without IT - tell them you'll both take a week vacay to demonstrate, and you'll see them start to justify things differently.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[moderatorrater]

Actually, I thought it was just the opposite. It sounds like his supervisor's getting some pressure from above to justify their cost, and he's trying to get the poster's help in justifying it. If the executives are smart but inexperienced in dealing with IT, then they'll receive the reports and be enlightened. If they're just looking to cut costs and have already made up their minds that IT is an unnecessary expenditure, then I doubt there's much that can be done.

Also, if the poster's supervisor IS trying to throw this guy under the bus, then he'd best start looking for another job anyway.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[jimicus]

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.

If you can't even take off two weeks, that suggests to me that you're firefighting rather than putting in genuinely useful time.

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

[Hairy Heron]

Yeah, because it's so hard to replace IT people. The guy would be fired in a few days and replaced by another IT monkey that can do his job and most likely for less pay. There are few ways faster to get yourself fired then to do stupid shit like you're advising. Plus I doubt he's going to like such a reputation following him around for subsequent interviews that he was abandoning his job in order to make a point.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[jimicus]

Better off does not = cheaper. Ive seen a lot of small offices, law firms, etc spend too much money for lousy service and poor response time from 3rd party support.

May not always be the case, but depending on what he does this may not be a good idea.

There's a simple reason for this.

The third party company will probably have a service level agreement with something like "n hour response, n*2 hour fix". It's in their interests to ensure that they only just have enough staff to be able to meet this. Any more will cost them more money while gaining very little.

Whereas many in-house IT departments are staffed on the basis of "how can we provide the best possible service (within reason) for the business" - and that generally means a rather more generous number of staff.

So even a relatively straightforward desktop support issue ("the hard disk in my PC's failed, I can't do anything") suddenly takes a whole working day to get fixed. Minimum. And that's assuming that they keep at least one spare PC and a person to swap them over onsite.

A whole working day in which the end user has basically sat around twiddling their thumbs.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[Applekid]

Answer that question for them and just walk out. Let 'em run a few days without an IT department. Come back in a week and witness the piles of help tickets, flaming servers, half-dead employees feeding on dead bodies, confused employees who don't know where their internets are, the quizzical look of managers gathered 'round a UNIX box with question marks floating over their heads, etc.

So you took the Microsoft tour during the launch of Vista? Brave man.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[beallj]

But there's a difference between an irreplaceable employee and an irreplaceable position. If he quits, retires, dies, etc, then there are more IT guys out there that the company could hire.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[rossz]

That doesn't work if you are very good at being a system admin. I left a company where I was the only technical person. They did not replace me (miserly boss). A year later the main office linux server (samba and email) was still chugging away. I'm not sure how long it ran after that before they brought someone in to update it.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[rtechie]

Please mod the parent up, this is a GREAT suggestion.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Sounds like you read some business advice and completely misinterpreted it. If you're irreplaceable, then you should be made replaceable if practical. If not practical, then steps should be taken to limit the scope of impact if you're hit by a bus. For instance, documenting how things are set up in the server room and what needs to be done each month/quarter/year.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[Fulcrum of Evil]

I didn't see any ultimatum there.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[Bandman]

I wish I could take two weeks off.

I'm building an entire new infrastructure while fighting fires on the existing one. And doing user support, and all sort of other fun things.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[Bandman]

It's amazing how many companies take the exact opposite view. It's discouraging.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[prelelat]

I agree that you should not make yourself irreplacable you should have documentation with detailed maps of your network and systems. What the parent was trying to say was that if you leave and no one is there to pick up the slack when your off do they:

A)panic and hide under a desk until you return
B)call you in a panic to come fix it or remote in to fix it
C)hire a contracter to come and fix the problem temporarily
D)not have any problems at all and fire you on your return

Chances are that if your doing a good job and nothing has been deployed in the last while you will end up with D) without the firing. Because thats not a good way to justify your worth. The way you justify your worth is by documenting problems in a ticket system and can show what your doing on a break fix scenario. Show them the projects that your working on and then show them the cost of going with a contractor to do them. Show them how much overtime you spend working on things that need to get done.

If your not doing break fix, updates or implementing new technology or modifying them then you probably arn't needed. If the place goes up in flames while you were gone it either means you didn't do a good job building your infustructure or that some update came out and you weren't managing updates with something like sus or some virus got through your systems. These are good things to show as well as project plans for the future, these are the things that will be accomplished in the future to prevent downtime, this is what will happen if they aren't done and finally this is the cost and time that it takes to implement them.

You shouldn't have to justify your job by how badly things turn when your gone because your job is to prevent them from happing in the first place and having the backups setup for when they will anyways.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[SatanicPuppy]

SO true. I've been working behind "irreplaceable" people for years, and the period of chaos and readjustment that follows their departure generally smooths into a whole new era of productivity.

If you write stuff that only you can support, if you spend your time keeping users ignorant and helpless, if you don't believe in documentation...you need to go, because you are a HUGE problem.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[elex]

Assuming you live in a metro area. In my area I can't even think of somebody qualified to replace me within a 30 minute drive.

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!

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[Hadlock]

In this economy, they're most likely looking to cut costs, especially with the rise in cost of raw materials. I've seen several (4) manufacturers (note he said he's IT for a manufacturer) go down in flames in the last year out of the 72 manufactures we work with. Another two have consolidated and significantly downsized their customer service departments.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[Hairy Heron]

Sure, if you live in some remote rural area that might be true. IT monkeys are a dime a dozen in almost any other place.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[PitaBred]

There are irreplaceable positions, though. You can't do without AN IT guy is the point, not that he has to be THE IT guy. Big difference... IT as a position is necessary. This guy is trying to justify his position, not the fact that he is the one that does it.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[PitaBred]

The position is vital. The person is not. That's enough justification for what the original poster asked... how do you justify the existence of IT. Not "How do I justify me as being the only person capable of providing IT services?"

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[Hairy Heron]

The whole point is either keep me around or see how much you suffer. The meaning is the same. But hey, if the idiot doesn't want to keep his job for much longer, please do follow the advice. I'm sure being unhireable for some time afterwards due to a shitty reputation was worth showing your boss up!

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[Hairy Heron]

Sure, but if the person asking the question were to follow that advice he'd be out of a job in short order. I'm pretty sure he would want to keep his job, no?

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[PitaBred]

True, it's very easy to find IT people. The problem is that it is very hard to find GOOD IT people. Most companies I've been had, even small ones, have gone through more than a few IT people before finding someone that wasn't blisteringly incompetent (like the guy who kept a list of user names and passwords for everyone, the guy who couldn't keep Exchange running, used a "universal" username/password for very sensitive data so everyone could have access...)

Competent computer guys aren't nearly as common as your post would indicate, and if you have a good one, it's well worth keeping him around. Limping along with an MCSE-bearing Nick Burns monkey is possible, but it won't let IT get out of the way and keep working to let business get on with doing business.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[jgarry]

I'm not sure how long it ran after that before they brought someone in to update it.

One time I was brought in to fix a hiccupping db. Poking about, discovered they had been diligently taking backups every night. Took me a while to figure out how they fit all that stuff onto one tape. Or rather, it hadn't fit onto the tape for at least 18 months. In fact, all the tapes were going bad, so I couldn't even get a good backup. Most of the disk space was taken up by overflow pointers. Fixing this somehow reminded me of a snail crawling on the edge of a razor blade. They can do that, you know. As long as you don't push down on them.

This was a casting department in a very large TV/Movie studio, db was for contracting actors for shows we've all heard of. The IT department was competent enough, they just didn't know much or care about this odd old technology, they had more important things to worry about. They wound up contracting me to migrate it to newer hardware.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[Grishnakh]

Not necessarily. A company can do without IT, and just let other employees do it. Of course, the results won't be pretty.

Similarly, janitorial services aren't essential either, as other employees can be asked to do this in their spare time, whenever they something that needs cleaning, etc. Of course, again, the results won't be pretty.

Having people dedicated to these positions allows other employees to be much more productive and efficient, and keeps disasters from happening.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[PitaBred]

Managers understand that it takes time and money to hire someone new... if there's already someone there, and the position is justified and working well, why change things?

The trick is making sure the position is justified, as the original poster is trying to do.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[element-o.p.]

Two weeks is nowhere near long enough for systems to begin failing if you are even moderately competent as a sys admin.

Take a three month sabbatical and then see how much they value you when you return. 'Course, after three months, they might have realized the error of their ways and already hired someone new because they couldn't live without a tech...

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Don't be so clueless - he advocated taking a vacation and seeing what happens. There's no 'or else' here, just expecting to come back and find out that something broke and nobody could fix it. OR are you saying that actually using vacation time makes you unhirable?

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[networkzombie]

You are correct. A skilled admin should have everything scripted to last a few months without error. If I took 2 weeks off, no one would miss me short of a hardware failure or ball lightening in the server room. Three months is just about when someone needs a password removed from a pdf file. When they call to price out that service, they will gladly offer me my job back. The short term desktop fixes are ignored when you take a few weeks off. Take a year off. When they get a price on fixing the RAID 5 on the Oracle database server due to multiple HDD failure, they will gladly triple your paycheck. FYI, replace bad disks, scrub disks, then restore from backup. No backup? Whaaa?

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[Hairy Heron]

if there's already someone there, and the position is justified and working well, why change things?

Why change things when a dime-a-dozen IT monkey acts like some irreplaceable prima donna? Probably because managers don't want to put up with such bullshit.

The trick is making sure the position is justified, as the original poster is trying to do.

I understand. That's why the person shouldn't follow the shitty advice given or else some other IT monkey is going to take his place and, as usually happens, they will do it for less.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[Hairy Heron]

Competent computer guys aren't nearly as common as your post would indicate, and if you have a good one, it's well worth keeping him around.

Not if they pull shit like what is being told of them to do. I've seen people with 10-15+ years of experience be dropped immediately because they tried to pull a similar act.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[mabhatter654]

the real problem is that companies don't plan for what to do with you NEXT. Your value is in setting up something to work... then what? The reward for IT staff doing good work is more complicated, meaningful work! Most management doesn't think nearly far enough ahead to move as fast as IT people move.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[WhiteHorse-The Origi]

I agree. They're going to fire him. To give you a realistic estimate, your services are worth $1000 for every 20 computers+1 server per month. That's the going rate for 10hrs of tech support from a consultant. So if your company has 100 computers and 5 servers, it'd take about $5000/month for external contractors. 200/10 would be the breaking point of $10,000 where it would be much cheaper to hire a full-time employee.

If you're supporting 200+ PCs, your job is secure. If not, you may get axed.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[toddestan]

A lot of these smaller shops there is just "the IT guy" that does everything. A lot of these places, when the IT guy goes on vacation, everyone just kind of holds their breath. Chances are pretty good the servers/network will chug along just fine for a couple of weeks unattended, but you never know what unforseen problem that might suddenly crop up and the one guy who runs everything isn't around to fix it.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[syousef]

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.

Ah the good old outsourcing solves everything myth. No one's going to look out for your company's interests better than a dedicated salaried employee that feels valued and has the right attitude. Bringing in another company just brings in outside interests (like bilking you for a profit, keeping out of legal disputes etc.) that have nothing to do with your own company's interests.

Re:Writing your own eulogy

[jimicus]

A lot of these smaller shops there is just "the IT guy" that does everything. A lot of these places, when the IT guy goes on vacation, everyone just kind of holds their breath. Chances are pretty good the servers/network will chug along just fine for a couple of weeks unattended, but you never know what unforseen problem that might suddenly crop up and the one guy who runs everything isn't around to fix it.

I know. I am the IT guy.

You're quite right, but I'd argue that if the place isn't big enough to have at least two IT people, it should have none at all and instead outsource - if only because there's a very great risk of that guy making himself indispensable.

Cost for NOT having IT?

[FnordX]

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?

Re:Cost for NOT having IT?

[epiphani]

Perfect!

Break something important. Calculate how much time is spent bitching about it for the next 24 hours. Multiply by 365 days and by the average salary. Thats how much you save!

How to make most glorious revolution that IT

[1_brown_mouse]

404 Translation server error

Make friends with a beancounter

[dreamchaser]

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.

Re:Make friends with a beancounter

[wild_quinine]

I think that it's important to remember that costs do need to be justified. IT is often underappreciated, but it's also a special kind of arrogance to assume that yours is the one indispensible role in the company.

It's perfectly fair to justify your costs. People seem to think that this means they are being automatically undervalued, or that they shouldn't need to perform such an exercise. Well, I've got news for you. If you're in management then, yes, you do.

Just because your role is necessary does not mean that it could not be fulfilled by someone else, for less.

All well functioning companies are like bowls of water. They may be less full when you take out key staff, but there isn't a hole left behind.

And even if your job could not be done as well for less, it is perfectly justifiable to ask: 'Should we do it less well, for less?'.

And we can all hope that the answer to that question is 'no'. But that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be asked.

Re:Make friends with a beancounter

[Bandman]

You're assuming that the submitter works for a well functioning company. He and his boss are the only IT workers. I have a very similar vantage point.

I'm fairly sure that without someone in my position, things would grind to a half here in a matter of weeks. Aside from the loss of braintrust, the stuff that would fall through the cracks would pile up and clog the gears the keep our business working.

It's not a good situation (and it certainly limits the amount of time off I get), but it's what we've got at the moment. The board of directors is going to be examining whether to hire another admin soon, and it can't happen fast enough for me.

How much does it cost ..

[johnlcallaway]

.. 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.

Re:How much does it cost ..

[khellendros1984]

This is essentially the post I was going to make. The value of preventive actions should be measured by what would happen if they weren't done. If someone isn't there doing your job, how quickly do things go to crap, and how much trouble does it cause when they do?

Re:How much does it cost ..

[DrLang21]

It also needs to be measured by the likelihood of things not happening. If you subtract one IT worker, and the result is about 1 hour of extra downtime per year, then the one IT employee's value isn't so great. If the cost is a couple days of downtime, then it becomes a different matter.

Re:How much does it cost ..

[Cyner]

I'm a NetAdmin and completely agree. IT does not save money, it allows for others to make money. When someone asks me how I justify myself, I ask them how they justify the electric bill. Electricity does not directly produce profits, it allows other assets to do so.

Re:How much does it cost ..

[thsths]

> If my desktop doesn't work, how much is the company spending for me to sit around doing nothing.

Exactly. Ask your "customers" how long it would take them to do the same job. That would usually be a lot longer than it takes you - and bingo, you have a business case.

Re:How much does it cost ..

[PingPongBoy]

.. 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

That is so sad. It justifies Google or Microsoft putting the necessary apps on the Internet. The value of IT becomes in the long run, asymptotically, the cost of buying modern computers and network plus an Internet connection.

IT people should be improving things to help the business scale up or take on new work. There are many business cases for machinery over labor: computers help people doing better work, people solve problems, keep track of things, etc.

We're at the pleasant age when a nifty gadget is always coming around the corner so the IT department keeps adding and subtracting from the infrastructure, and it gets so easy that someone with a little technical talent can get it done and keep it running for an office without much work. I know some offices where there is no IT department, but there are 50 people handling massive volumes of information. All they have to do is cooperate about where the stuff is stored on the network.

Even if an IT person isn't inventing anything, s/he should line up the next round of upgrades or look for ways of replacing people or learn about new business angles that need equipment. There's a lot to do, but IT people have a chance to make work interesting and productive

Re:How much does it cost ..

[mabhatter654]

it's like not changing the oil in your car to save money.. sure it works for a while and when things act up you might be OK.... you might not be.

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

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:5 reasons for any business decision

[mcgrew]

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

Not any more, grandpa. It ain't like it was when we were young.

#1 and #2 are the same; the legal dept. takes care of that (even if your legal dept is one guy on retainer). #3 is the reason for your company's existance.

#4 has morphed to "how best to cheat the customer out of his money, and find more customers to cheat

#5 Employees' quality of life??? MUAHAHAHAAAHAAA!!!

These days is #5 has morphed into "golden parachute for the CEO, fuck the employees and hold the lube. Like customers, there are lots more employees where they came from!"

Re:5 reasons for any business decision

[PitaBred]

It'll keep being that way as long as economics lessons are from the 80's... I see a couple flickering lights of people realizing that it's better to build a strong business, but for every one of those, there are twenty that would rather make a dollar today instead of $10 tomorrow.

There is no justification for IT

[Weasel Boy]

Your CEO should buy a Mac for everyone in the company and fire the whole IT department.

Re:There is no justification for IT

[Bobfrankly1]

I work for one of those companies. Without the IT department, the macs would have been thrown out the windows already (not a pun!).

Re:There is no justification for IT

[Atti K.]

Fail. Keeping the IT department is cheaper.

Re:There is no justification for IT

[dave420]

Not even that! Just get a single top-of-the-line Mac, put it on a golden pedestal in the lobby, and have it slowly rotate. Play some quiet acoustic U2 from hidden speakers, and your company will never need to spend another dime on IT ever again. A smoke machine and turtle-neck sweaters for everyone wouldn't hurt, either.

How to Justifying the Existence of IT?

[OneEyedJack]

"How to Justifying the Existence of IT?" ??!!

How is babby formed?

Tell him what he wants to hear.

[duffbeer703]

Perception is more important than reality in this case.

Cost risk

[DoofusOfDeath]

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:

• The degree by which you reduce the probability of various risks, and
• The cost to the company if each individual risk gets realized.

(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?

simple

[Lord Ender]

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.

Re:simple

[Narshada]

My boss has a tendency to view IT as non profit making and costly. I remind him that before me he had two people doing my job at an overall cost of way over twice what I make. Then I show him the number of issues I've resolved in the last month and ask him how he thinks the business would run without someone on site to handle these problems. Then I show him how much value I add to the company by doing lots of other jobs, such as going in on a weekend and helping with PAT testing, ordering ink cartridges and writing pages for the website. Finally I show him how much it would cost to outsource to someone that charges an hourly rate and see if I can actually hear his sphincter tighten. It's really simple: If (!IT){ sales==0; }

Guesstimate the Worst

[Foofoobar]

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.

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.

Maintenance isn't new

[Todd Knarr]

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?

Re:Maintenance isn't new

[LunaticTippy]

This is terrible advice. Nearly every company outsources janitorial now, as opposed to 50 years ago when it would be an in-house position with a pension. More and more maintenance is outsourced as well.

If you point out that your job is just like the janitor's or the guy rebuilding pumps you are asking them to outsource your job.

Re:Maintenance isn't new

[Todd Knarr]

My immediate reply to that suggestion is "Company marketing plans. Legal strategy documents. The CEO's e-mail. The company's detailed internal financial records. Do we regularly hand those over to someone outside the company? No, didn't think so. Anyone doing my job is going to have access to those things, they can't do the job without it. What kind of risk will you be taking giving someone who isn't within the company access to those things?". Just the legal aspects alone make the company lawyers curl up in a corner whimpering considering recent e-discovery rulings. And if you have to have someone in-house to do that kind of work for all the stuff you can't let an outsider see without undue risk, it's cheaper to have them doing all the work rather than pay for them and the outsourced people too.

Re:Maintenance isn't new

[Grishnakh]

I work at a F-500 company (a major semiconductor manufacturer), and our entire IT department is outsourced to an Indian company.

Of course, our company isn't doing too hot financially....

Re:Maintenance isn't new

[Grishnakh]

Sorry, no. I actually used to work at Intel, until about 2 years ago, and their IT department was not (at that time) outsourced at all. Compared to my new company (I'd prefer not to say until my employment there is past-tense), the IT at Intel was superb. The IT at this new place is a nightmare.

The new place is a big company, but still much smaller than Intel, maybe around 20k employees. Unfortunately the management isn't very good, and I don't expect it to do well in the years ahead.

Easy!

[Forrest Kyle]

Just stop working for 2 months and then ask the CEO how much money he lost. =)

Slashdot

[C_Kode]

Slashdot = Learning about new stuff to use at work @$25/hr

Not doing your job?

[simplu]

What's happening if they cannot use their desktops? Or the servers are down? How much this costs?

backup

[pak9rabid]

When in this position what do you folks usually do?"

Have a good employment backup plan.

backup backup backup

[jagb]

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 :-)

That's easy.

[mweather]

All you do is stop doing your job and wait for everything to crash, then figure out how much money the company lost.

Re:That's easy.

[powerspike]

he might pass the deadline if he does that....
turn off all the servers, and ask the accountants how much cash they are losing per hour, leave them off for 24 hours, and ask how much that cost.
and then point out, that it would take the same amount of time to fix if the issues where outsourced as well ;)

Re:That's easy.

[WhiteHorse-The Origi]

Too true. Every now and again, it's good to remind people to their faces. I learned that when I was doing a good job, nobody noticed. When I did a mediocre job, I was their hero that came in to rescue them when the sh!t hit the fan...

Rule 2.5

[petes_PoV]

Because the boss (directors, shareholders, owner etc.) said it shall be done.

(don't make the mistake of thinking this is a humourous response - it's not. it's a fact.)

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

[skelly33]

I had a similar thought except that I acknowledge that nobody else is competent enough to solve their own problems and ultimately need someone to call. If you are not on staff, then the call would be going to an outside contractor/consultant. IT is a necessity whether on staff or contracted. So, what would the going contractor rates have cost the company for all the break-fix type work you've been doing, not to mention the preventative actions? I guarantee it would be a fortune that easily justifies your position.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[SteveInMI]

They're not going back to doing things by hand... UNLESS you stop doing preventative maintenance and things start to fall apart. Estimate the number and duration of outages that would be occurring with no preventative maintenance; then estimate the cost in wasted personnel time for the folks who would have nothing to do while they wait for their systems to be restored. Now calculate the cost of the ACTUAL outages, and subtract that from the cost of the outages that COULD have happened. The difference is what you saved the firm.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[Anonymous Coward]

More to the point, focus on that care-and-feeding stuff. If it weren't for you, the preventative stuff wouldn't get done. If things aren't maintained properly, stuff breaks. Then just figure out the likelihood of that stuff breaking and how much time, money, and expertise it would take to fix, and there's your pricetag.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[LandDolphin]

Depends

Sure, they bill 3 - 4 times the hourly rate (or more). But you don't have them working for your 40/week. There is no benifits, insurance, taxes, social security. An employee costs the company a lot more then just their hourly rate.

For many smaller companies, paying someone to put out fires as they happen is cheaper then having someone inhouse.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, sure. And when their PBX goes down because of some obscure network issue, they are now out of communication for two hours while the "IT Guy" shows up. Or when the boss's hard drive stuffs up and he is now out of commission for two hours waiting for "the IT guy" to roll in from whatever previous appointment he may have been. There are a thousand little examples of things someone on-site could handle immediately. Calculate that against the downtime incurred by having to call some outsourced doofus every single time something goes wrong.

Plus, if you're a small business owner and you know nothing about technology, you have no way of knowing if the outsourced doofus is worth a damn. I deal with these people every single day, and the majority of them have virtually zero knowledge of anything other than basic, basic Windows problems.

Because they can open a command prompt and use ping, they look like IT Gods to the hapless businessman, but these people can't do basic network troubleshooting or administration, have no concept of how the internet works, how devices communicate with each other, software patching (not even writing -- just applying), or anything else. They're happy to take their 100 dollars an hour and skip away after calling someone else to solve the problem, but really, if it can't be fixed by rebooting Windows, most of these Geek Squad rejects are just as helpless as the person who hired them to take care of it.

On the other hand, for a modest salary, you can keep someone with a brain around full time to take care of the day-to-day BS and deal with major problems when they arise, with significantly less downtime, back-and-forth finger-pointing, and the other crap that goes along with third-party IT dweebs.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[Adriax]

An in house tech can fix problems faster than an outsourced tech, and has an interest in getting things back up properly not just patched together.
So not only factor in the hourly cost, but also take into account travel time, system familiarization, and the tech's vested interest in keeping the calls coming. All that equates to lost productivity, which can kill a small business at crunch time on a big project.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[LandDolphin]

Some "On-Call" IT companies get a monthly fee to make sure everything runs smooth. IF they were to simply "patch" the errors, and let them happen all of the time they would quickly find themselves replaced.

Because those "On-Call' IT Companies handle many different companies, it is often more profitable for them to keep the systems up and properly because they can increase how many companies they can provide service for without hiring more IT people themselves.

They want things not to break down as much as the company that hired them does. BEcause thne they get a monthly check without having to talk to manyone.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

An employee costs the company a lot more then just their hourly rate.

Not as much as you'd think. Depending on the benefits you provide, and including the additional 7.5% social security tax, you're looking about 20-40% of the salary cost (often including employer retirement fund and 401k matching contributions). While it's definitely worth considering in your calculations, it's not what I'd call "a lot more".

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[Bandman]

pshaw, how can they call the IT guy without phones ;-)

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[Bandman]

It would be useful to learn how companies like that determine what to bill for services. Knowing something like that would help the submitter make the decisions, I imagine.

Do you happen to know what metrics they use, like supported nodes, or something of that nature?

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[Archr5]

Exactly. Most contracted on-site technicians charge a Minimum rate for even the smallest jobs. The place we go through charges $150 per hour with a half hour minimum charge even if the fix only takes 5 minutes. So if I were you, I'd put all of your "urgent" issues in one bucket and "bill" them individually based on time spent as if you were a contractor, start them at $75 for even the smallest 5 minute fixes and go from there. Then take your preventative maintenance stuff and add it all together and charge that as one flat fee (since conceivably your company could call in a contractor once a month to spend all day (or a few days) doing preventative fixes and maintenance. but it'll still cost them more than you make an hour to be sure. Just stress when you're done that you're giving them a simplified breakdown that also involves them waiting on a tech to be scheduled and having little to no recourse if that tech makes things worse or isn't skilled, the opportunity cost of Not having you, a person who is familiary with their systems, on site at the moment of a break/fix type failure puts their costs into complex accounting figures that you're not capable of coming up with without spending hours doing calculations. Good Luck, Sounds to me like your boss might be one of the few out there who is actively trying to prove your value and get you a raise.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[hazem]

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.

I used to work in an engineering school that also had the CS department (I was one of the IT guys). At one of the faculty staff meetings they were trying to find ways to save money and someone proposed that the CS profs take over IT so they could get rid of me and my boss.

One of the CS profs retorted that it would be just fine and they'd be happy to do it when the civil engineers cleaned the toilets, the mechanical engineers fixed the windows, doors, and heating system, and the electrical engineers changed the lightbulbs. Thankfully, the proposal died a quick and quiet death.

You could also justify "in house" IT by evaluating the costs of outsourcing all the work to contractors.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[LandDolphin]

"a lot" is one of those "tricky" words. Means something different to everyone.

Increasing the cost of something 20-40% is a lot to me, might not be to someone. But I cringe when I see the sales tax of around 10% on a new car. I can't imagine what i'd do if I saw the price jump 20-40%.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[LandDolphin]

Unfortunitally I do not.

I'm sure the submitter could call a few of them and try to obtain pricing information. But, like most people trying to sell you something, they won't want to give out what they charge so easily.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[calmofthestorm]

I couldn't find any papyrus so I chisled my message on this little pyramid.

3 scott adams

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[deraj123]

But...you missed your own point. Get rid of the notion that everyone outsourced is incompetent and inhouse employees are experts. If I can't figure out how to pick competent contractors, how am I going to pick out competent employees?

So, if we assume the same level of skill on either end, we are then faced with your first point, which is having someone on site, on hand during business hours, or having to wait for someone to come in. The same case can be made for having one person on site, and having to wait for him while he's at another appointment, and having two people on site. It's an issue of scale. How many IT issues do I have, how quickly do I need them fixed, and how much is it worth to me?

So...we're back to the notion that for a small enough business, simply outsourcing may well be sufficient. Yes, I have to pick a competent outsourcer, but I'd have to pick a competent employee as well.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[iamhassi]

"So, what would the going contractor rates have cost the company for all the break-fix type work you've been doing, not to mention the preventative actions?"

Exactly. If your position wasn't there, who would step in and make the repairs? Contractors, geek squad or similar.

To calculate what you are worth, simply keep a log of all the tech support calls you do in a week. Anytime you help someone, regardless of how small, or restart a server or fix a printer or do anything tech support related at all, write it down. Then call some tech support contractors and ask how much they would charge for the various tasks, but pretend you're dumb and you're really having that problem, ask them how long it will take to get to your office. Remember to calculate the length of time it takes them to arrive as loss productivity for the employee or employees, because a printer problem affecting the entire office means no one can work. Then do the math.

I think you'll quickly see your monthly paycheck would be spent almost daily if they were to call contractors all the time, and the amount of money the DBA is saving will look like nothing compared to your position.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[sjames]

In many companies, if employees were left to do their own IT support, they would be more efficient if they DID go back to doing it by hand than they are trying to fix the problem.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[AigariusDebian]

For preventative tasks (which should be where a good sysadmin spends most of his time) I have two words - "risk assessment". Make a table of risks that you are preventing, probability of these risks occurring if your preventative actions are not taken and cost if the worst possible outcome strikes. Multiply and sum as appropriate and you will get a very nice looking figure of prevented cost.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[russotto]

Now calculate the cost of the ACTUAL outages, and subtract that from the cost of the outages that COULD have happened. The difference is what you saved the firm.

Exactly. And the best part of this is you can just make up the first number (be sure to include a lot of ass-pulled estimates in the "calculation") in order to make the total what your boss wants it to be. He'll know you're doing it, but he'll accept it anyway because that's what HIS boss wants. Welcome to the business world.

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.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[deraj123]

In addition, there are often a lot of other costs involved in having an employee. There are things like office space, insurance, equipment, etc. At my last job, when I was getting ready to leave, and they were looking to maintain me as a contractor, I sat down with my manager to calculate how much I cost her. It turned out that her cost for having me employed was 140% greater than my salary. I don't call that small.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[sumdumass]

Your also forgetting that the best advertising is word of mouth. If an outsource company is being bad mouthed by the businesses they serve, they are going to have a difficult time finding future contracts. If on the other hand, someone who uses your service brags about how satisfied they are, you will probably end up replacing the other guy or at least be in the running when the time comes. Most of my contracts are word of mouth, I do absolutely no advertising other then the occasional conversation when someone asks me what I do and don't even carry business cards.

I have been able to keep as much business as I want and ever get rid of the hard to please customers.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[Richard Frost]

No. If you put a company on a fixed payment monthly contact, they'll just keep coming up with increasingly inane 'problems' to report so that they feel they get their money's worth out of you. So the number of hours you have to put in for a company actually increases, as you track down the solution to a problem no one else in the world has.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

I'd question the math - you are still being provided with office space and a computer if you're an employee. Company liability insurance is unchanged; and health insurance is included in that "20-40%" number that I provided above. Do you have a breakdown, it's easily possible I've forgotten something. My numbers are based on when I had a small business a couple of years back that offered 401k, health insurance, vacation time, and a few other perks.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[sr8outtalotech]

Actually, the right question might be is it cheaper to maintain in house staff or outsource?

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[Lershac]

Well seeing as how thats what I do...

When recruiting a company as a client... I figure .5 hrs a month per pc (including servers, yes for pcs thats high and for servers thats lowbut usually for your 1-2 server small office that works out) and then for a contract client of say 10 pcs and 1 server, thats ~5 hrs a month. Usually I give a 33% discount off hourly rate ($75 yes thats low, but it works for me) for prepaid clients and poof, $250 a month and I spend ~4 hours a month on average in that clients office. All based on experience here.

Projects, new pcs and other out of the maintenance band type stuff is just extra.

And yes, some months I win, and spend very little time, and some months I lose. So far that has worked out very well.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Not as much as you'd think. Depending on the benefits you provide, and including the additional 7.5% social security tax, you're looking about 20-40% of the salary cost (often including employer retirement fund and 401k matching contributions).

It's demonstrably more than you think. Computers, electricity, office space, oversight, office supplies, etc.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[gravyface]

I'm in a similar situation with our small shop IT business and would be very much interested in swapping notes with you. My email is gravyface at mail with a g prepended .com.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[Aladrin]

I disagree. They aren't irrelevant. Without him, they -would- have to go back to doing it all by hand. He keeps it running. With what he's been asked, it's just as valid to calculate it that was as any other. (I'm assuming he isn't overpaid. If he is, well... he's in trouble.)

Personally, my attitude would be: So you want me to stop being productive and start doing accounting work that I'm not qualified for? If they said yes, I'd start looking for another job. It's obvious big changes are afoot, and the job will like suck quite a bit more afterwards.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[Aladrin]

Oh, and before anyone says "You wouldn't really do that," I really did have a boss who would do things like this. The answer was to show him that he was wasting your time and his money. The few times that didn't work, the answer was to make it clear that you didn't like wasting your time, and you realize it might be better spent elsewhere. I believe I worked there about 6 different times while looking for another job. He always called me back (with a raise) because he couldn't find anyone else who was competent.

I actually stopped working there finally because the last raise I demanded was in excess of what the business could support. I knew that at the time, but he had insulted me pretty good on the last round.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[Actually, I do RTFA]

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.

I would assume that everyone wouldn't do more maintence work than the population at large. I would look at the average downtime of Windows XP boxes (assuming that's what you use) in homes, subtract the downtime of your boxes, and call the results the additional hours of productivity that you delivery per employee. Then you can multiply that by their salary to determine much money you save.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[nine-times]

You could also justify "in house" IT by evaluating the costs of outsourcing all the work to contractors.

I think that's the real answer here. The work has to get done somehow, so if you want to justify the cost you're paying, compare it to the alternatives.

At the same time, there's another problem in that people might not understand that they work has to get done somehow. I've had jobs before where some people assumed I didn't do much, because most people generally don't think too much about it when things are working. I've seriously had someone say to me once, "Your job is easy. You don't do anything. All our IT stuff just works." I really had to explain, "No, our IT stuff doesn't just work. It works most of the time because I set it up properly and maintain it all. There are regular problems, but you don't pay much attention to that because I fix it."

I used to make the mistake of quietly fixing things and not drawing attention to how much I'd done. You don't have to be a drama queen or anything, but if you really want people to understand how valuable you are, sometimes you have to be open about all the things you deal with.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[neonsignal]

though I guess you should leave out the line item about keeping up your slashdot account

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[Methuselah2]

Same here, all word of mouth. I take pride in having never advertised. Once in a while I tell myself I should put a business card in my wallet. But few of my customers use paper anymore.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[Tubal-Cain]

Or make sure your job description includes a line about keeping an eye on changes in the industry.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[jonaskoelker]

because a printer problem affecting the entire office means no one can work.

I did part-time programming for a company for a year, recently. I never used the printer.

Even if your current task requires the printer, you can probably work on a future task, or a related task, or on organizing the tasks that are coming down the pipe. Or you can talk with your coworkers; share information and ideas, teach each other skills and tricks.

There are always ways in which you can make yourself valuable for your company. Some work better than others, of course, but there's no reason to busy-wait for the printer if you can move on and poll just every once in a while.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[supernova_hq]

My email is gravyface at mail with a g prepended .com.

http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=prepend&i=49641,00.asp

God I hate how people accept that abomination as a word...

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.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[Povidius]

I dunno... ask your neighbor? Seriously, there's gotta be a number for your helpdesk!

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[ObitMan]

almost...
problem clients get billed more or "fired"
they are not profitable
they are damaging to a reputation and to the business relationship.
Fixed monthly contracts can be a bust for both the client and the provider when the situation you presented does arise.

I sell blocks of time and provide routine maitenance.
It's in the customer's best interest that i'm not using up all thier block time as they purchase it at a reduced rate.
This provides the following benefits for them:
Bugeting concerns.
Truer picture of how much they spend on IT labor.
preferred status when problems arise as they have already paid for service.
preferred billing methods, actual time vs incrimental billing.
Fear of calling for service because money is tight thereby letting a problem compound.

For me the benefit is:
Cash flow
Guarantee of continuing relationship provided i perform adequately.
during routine maintenance I can bring things to thier attention.
customer is less likely to "find" inane things for me to work on since the blocks don't expire for a year.
If funds are tight a Customer doesn't wait to call when a problem arises as they have already paid for service.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[RockWolf]

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.

Absolutely agree with you on that point - I'm an inexperienced sysadmin/network admin/helpdesk/general dog to kick when things break at a small business, and we've got an IT guy on call to set things up, fix things when I'm doing my real work, etc etc. Anyhow, the boss complains when the bill comes in, because he never sees a body, and therefore obviously nothing happens.

These computer systems just fix themselves, right?

/~Wolf

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[bensode]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdQ8qvndIGM

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[Idaho]

Yeah, sure. And when their PBX goes down because of some obscure network issue, they are now out of communication for two hours while the "IT Guy" shows up. Or when the boss's hard drive stuffs up and he is now out of commission for two hours waiting for "the IT guy" to roll in from whatever previous appointment he may have been.

For most small companies, this kind of occurrence is not the end of the world though. If you had a small company (say 5-10 employees), would you rather pay $500 or so per month to get this kind of "we-call-you, you-fix-it" service, or pay a full-time sysadmin, which I'm guessing would probably be about an order of magnitude more expensive?

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[Idaho]

Exactly. Most contracted on-site technicians charge a Minimum rate for even the smallest jobs. The place we go through charges $150 per hour with a half hour minimum charge even if the fix only takes 5 minutes.

Obviously. I mean, perhaps you'd like to be called just so you can drive over to wherever the company is located (probably taking 30 minutes at least round trip), fix the thing in 5 minutes, and send a bill for $10, but personally I'd rather spend my time more efficiently.

I would be fine with the company gathering small tasks so I can do them all at once, at least it gives you the sense that you're accomplishing something useful.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[Brad Eleven]

I wonder whether any of us have approached our management with an analogous demand, e.g., "Justify why I should continue to work here. Your technology choices are rotting my skills, you don't compensate me at all for the extra time I put in, and you really have no idea what it is that I do for you."

Unfortunately, most management seems to [continue to] hew to the fantasy of a "run book" for their operations. It's as though they believe that anyone could do my job, that their operation is static, and that because I seem to be idle during normal working hours that they're somehow being ripped off. Conversely, they seem to think that my 24/7 availability is some magical free bonus, and that I enjoy explaining to my family that we have to postpone our vacation again because of my profession.

They really seem to believe that it's possible to completely document everything for quick and ready reference so that anyone with a modicum of technical knowledge can take care of any problem. This implies that they view me as an expensive and completely replaceable part.

I personally view IT in the same light as health care. It's a big risk to cut costs, and both industries have shifted away from the old "family doctor" model in favor of "managed care." The new model looks good on paper, but falls short in practice.

OTOH, it's difficult to find a good doctor or a good sysadmin, because you don't really know how talented/reliable either one is until you have a problem. And you must trust the professional to identify, explain, and remedy the problem. When the cost seems high, you're likely to push back, thereby reversing the decision to hire and trust the professional in the first place.

Ultimately, viewing the care of one's body or of a business' systems as an overhead cost that can be cut to save money is very risky.

I know what my doctor's response would be if I asked him to justify my paying him, and it wouldn't be deliverable documentation. I've had several positions that already occurred as poor work environments, such that the demand for me to justify my existence triggered a flight response. Of these, more than half dropped the demand when I told them I was leaving. In every case, I was left wondering who put the idea into their heads that IT support was somehow easily replaceable, even disposable.

That's not my advice to you. There exists a balance that keeps management aware of the value of your work and keeps you aware of how your efforts are perceived by those who account for it.

I say educate them in the way they're asking, and find a method that leaves you with more knowledge, too. The predictable response on your part is submissive and leaves you feeling powerless, possibly worrying about the canard called "job security." Whether they keep you or toss you--and whether you stay or leave--both should benefit from the effort.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[Brooks138]

I worked until just recently at a small IT consulting firm... and let me tell you that at most places their IT staff (if they have any) is no better...

I think the problem lies in HOW people get into IT, not how knowledgeable people who are in IT are. Right now, and in the recent past, you have diploma mills churning out IT "graduates" who know nothing more about computers than the fact that people who work on them charge a lot. What you end up with is all the Joe T. Plumbers out there, who hate their jobs and don't even like computers at home, going to school for IT jobs.

There are just a lot of people on the market right now who don't know anything beyond what they learn in school... they are just in it for the money. How can you expect that these people who have no drive to learn on their own are going to be good at what they do... It doesn't matter where they end up working.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

None of which goes away if you have office staff that's non-IT...

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[Sabriel]

As languages go, English is the nicest abomination I ever met.

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[darkpixel2k]

At our company the only way to submit a problem ticket is via a web browser. I still haven't figured out how to submit a ticket when my computer won't boot. This is for real at a fortune 500 company.

The same way the welfare crew in my town calls 911 for an ambulance because they have a headache. They go to the one trailer out of 15 that has a phone and tells that person to call 911.

The ambulance ends up getting dispatched to an 'unknown medial somewhere in the trailer park'

Re:Compare with the present, not the past

[iamhassi]

"I did part-time programming for a company for a year, recently. I never used the printer."

If you read the article: "I work for a small manufacturing company....", so I'm guessing they probably print shipping labels, invoices, etc. Obviously some offices use printers less often.

"Even if your current task requires the printer, you can probably work on a future task..."

True, but you can't guarantee that 100% of the time. I suppose he could ask each person he helps with a printer issue if they had other work they could have done if he couldn't help them with that.... ok printer's a bad example. How about router issues? Or shared drive issues? Point being there's some tasks he does that effect the entire office, and if it goes out and they have to wait hours for geeksquad to show up that could mean salary for entire office being lost.

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:One question ...

[crashcodesdotcom]

I don't understand why people want to compare his value with an outside contractor since they'd be doing the same job. I thought the objective of the exercise was to determine how much value the things he does brings to the company. If you compare with what it costs to bring in an outside guy to fix say a printer problem that doesn't help you know how much fixing a printer problem is really worth that only lets you know how much it would cost someone else to do the same job.

The only logical approach I can see is to find out what it costs the company if the the printer doesn't get fixed; but that brings us to a number that no manager wants to hear so they may be content to go with valuing the work as the price to have the lowest bidder do the same task.

I think the bottom line is that yes your job is that critical but so are a dozen or more other positions at your company which makes the whole exercise a waste of time.

Re:One question ...

[crashcodesdotcom]

Forgot one more thing, you didn't see the boss using outside labor to do his job as a savings basis.

leave

[BigJClark]

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.

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.

Re:first things first (answered)

[FuckTheModerators]

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.

The devil is in the details -- Get some metrics!

[lucm]

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).

Insurance

[Coreigh]

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.

Ask him...

[Angostura]

how you should justify the cost of the time spent calculating the cost.

Unplug everything

[Toe, The]

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.

Re:Unplug everything

[MikeBabcock]

While realizing he's paying the new contractor out of the lawsuit settlement he got from you.

Re:Unplug everything

[Bandman]

You work every day to prevent a maniac from coming in and unplugging your equipment? Are you an armed guard?

By prevention of lost work hours perhaps?

[Drakkenmensch]

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.

Reality check

[Slicebo]

"When in this position what do you folks usually do?"

I usually start looking for a new job.

Re:Reality check

[powerspike]

oh i just quit, and said good luck, 2 months later he wanted me back, now i'm doing two days a week for the same amount, and he thanks me for showing up everyday, instead of questing everything that was done. it's not as stupid as it sounds, when employers smeel fear, they'll take you for everything they can

Two keys to include

[porkface]

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.

Vacation Time

[M1000]

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...

Re:Vacation Time

[TimSSG]

I was always afraid they would say you were gone for two weeks, we did not notice. Tim S

roi?

[gEvil (beta)]

from the all-about-roi dept.

It's always about the king, isn't it....

Easy way to prove you are necessary.

[B5_geek]

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.

Trying to Boil it down...

[Bobfrankly1]

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.

Re:Trying to Boil it down...

[rtechie]

Long experience has taught me that people don't listen. If you tell them "X really bad thing will happen if I'm not around" they simply will not believe you or they will wrongly assume the problem isn't as bad as your describe.

If I was this guy I would update my resume and start looking for a new job. It looks like they want to fire him and if a company is looking to cut corners on IT it's not a place he wants to work.

Re:Trying to Boil it down...

[Bobfrankly1]

I agree that there are people that don't listen. And updating the resume and shopping the market is definitely a smart move, but it shouldn't be the only one.

Getting a job really is a matter of selling yourself. Chances are that his department is being asked to "make the case" for their jobs, and likely his department isn't the only one. So he has to "re-sell" himself. Management might have 3 guys, with one understanding the need for IT, but not being able to explain it to the other two, who may be looking at IT to make cuts.

The economy is taking a big dump the world over, he *may* be able to get employment somewhere else, but in time the new company will be asking their departments to justify their jobs, and he'll be right back in the same boat, if not worse.

It's a sucky nerve-racking situation, but even if his company is going to make the cuts regardless, he can get the reasons for his job in his head, which can make him more effective in the interview process.

Defending his job will benefit him, even if he loses the job, but simply running to another company may cause bigger issues.
(On the other hand, if it's a sucky job, long commute, and consistently thankless, he would be well served to get out of such a place. However, factors such as these are not detailed in his question.)



gets back off his soapbox, again.

How valuable is the Fire Department?

[aitala]

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

Re:How valuable is the Fire Department?

[Bandman]

A town with only one house probably doesn't need a fire department. I imagine fire departments measure effectiveness in how many fires they fight, and their success in doing so.

Which is not all-together different from how I measure my effectiveness.

Re:How valuable is the Fire Department?

[mobby_6kl]

>Ask him, "How does one justify a Fire Department if your house has never burned down?"

Well yeah, except this would not necessarily be arguing in the submitter's favor. Imagine if their company/house kept its own fire department (as they do with the IT dpt.), complete with a shiny red fire truck, a few shirtless muscular guys and all the other necessary stuff, all just in case a fire breaks out. This has to be supported whenever the company is operational.

Then compare it to the cost of outsourcing firefighting somewhere, and paying only when a fire is extinguished. Even if they charge significantly more per call or per hour than the in-house operation costs, total costs over a period would be much, much lower. Plus, since they're constantly active, they're likely to be far more experienced.

For the pedantic, yes, there are exceptions of course, such as if the company is specialized in flammable chemicals, or has a huge territory inaccessible from the outside. And obviously fire department != IT department. However, depending on the exact situation, the submitter's little IT department might be about as justifiable as the in-house firefighting team in this example.

Easy

[Aphoxema]

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?"

Re:Easy

[Aphoxema]

You're already fucked if someone's going to either humor your proposal or fire you over something like that.

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:Start printing copies of your resume at work

[geekoid]

Woefully ignorant.
It is common practice to do this, ad in fact if you do it right it can be a very powerful tool.
I like doing it, and when things seems sketchy have done it on my own to take 'initiative'. Really to let them know how much not getting the work done will cost them.

Re:Start printing copies of your resume at work

[bertok]

Except as the grandparent pointed out, you are now doing your own job, and your bosses' job too, and the best possible outcome is that you merely keep your old pay while working harder to hold on to it.

The worst outcome is that you're fired anyway, despite years of contribution to the operation of the business, because your boss is an idiot. Believe me, he'll keep his job. He'll even get a bonus for reducing IT costs.

When everything goes to shit a few months later, he'll hire contractors to do your job for 3x the cost.

I should know. I'm one of those contractors!

Tell him you are taking a long vacation

[Coward Anonymous]

Tell him you will take a long vacation and will not be available for tech support. You are priceless!

Re:Tell him you are taking a long vacation

[Hairy Heron]

Yep, so priceless that they will fire you and replace you with someone who will do the same work for less. Enjoy that unemployment line!

It's the TC

[ZonkerWilliam]

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.

You're there to keep things sane.

[ErichTheRed]

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.)

do something propper

[Casandro]

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.

Turn random things off

[crypticedge]

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.

"break fix stuff"

[jannesha]

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.

Re:A business guys point of view.

[Hairy Heron]

Not having an internal IT department is not the same as saying you have no use for technology.

apt anecdote + advice

[tsstahl]

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.

Re:apt anecdote + advice

[WhiteHorse-The Origi]

I've seen this too at a couple companies. The sad part is that you have to lose your job in order for them to realize what you did for them. Don't know what you've got until it's gone... Thumbs up their asses..

Just go on vacation for a couple of months

[garaged]

They will appreciate you without any need for writen justification.

Come on, just disable the anti-spam, they will get the point.

Leave

[zmooc]

When in this position what do you folks usually do?

Leave. And find another job with a slightly more competent manager:-)

Ha ha, but seriously

[Weasel Boy]

"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. ;-)

VERY simple answer

[mandark1967]

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 /."

Transparency

[jpmacl]

(from an old blog post)

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

Re:Transparency

[Bandman]

That's a great analysis of the problem.

I like your ideas, and would like to subscribe to your newsle..err blog. Thanks.

Other things to consider

[omfglearntoplay]

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.

well first there was the cosmic turtle...

[jollyreaper]

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.

go over what you do in a week

[goffster]

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.

The Short Answer

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

All your data are belong to us, boss.

It's not your job to set standards

[taustin]

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.)

Get Out.

[CompMD]

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.

Re:Get Out.

[geekoid]

IF they didn't have a work Visa, I hope you called the proper authorities about who they are hiring.

Re:Get Out.

[CompMD]

Yeah, I have friends in the DOJ that got a phone call, because the guy who replaced me was trying to get away with working on his OPT time while he voluntarily left grad school.

You're a lawyer

[RyoShin]

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.

Re:You're a lawyer

[IorDMUX]

So, ask them if they are currently being sued or the government is investigating them.

Unless, of course, he works IT for the telecommunications industry. In that case, the army of IP lawyers may not be the best comparison. In the time that I've been employed with my company, the number of simultaneous suits in which we were involved (either as plaintiff or defendant--or both) varied somewhere between 4 and 7.

If somebody asked me that question, I think I'd be better off using the janitors as a comparison.

Re:You're a lawyer

[RyoShin]

A janitor would probably work to, but wouldn't be as "glamorous". Though, in the situation you pose, it does seem the better option.

Lawyer was the first thing that sprung to mind when I thought about this a while back.

Well, in the telecom industry, I imagine you'd have more security risks/hacking attempts than a textile plant, so active lawyers might not be such a bad comparison. Both are there to deal with the shit of others. Janitor is a good plan B, though.

You have two choices

[Overzeetop]

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.

Just shut down the servers

[rossz]

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.

Valuing Yourself is GOOD

[clawhound]

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.

Setting your value

[Burning1]

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.

Answer a question with a question

[dilvish_the_damned]

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.

Re:The devil is in the details -- Get some metrics

[Raccroc]

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.

Simple

[slashdotlurker]

Ask Stephen King.

How do you justify not having IT?

[DragonTHC]

Simple. Send your IT people home for one week of paid vacation.

See what happens.

Brilliant

[Weaselmancer]

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.

Re:Brilliant

[hobbit]

Seconded. I wrote something similar but considerably less comprehensive. If I'd seen Burning1's answer straight away I wouldn't have bothered!

Blog, wiki, whatever...

[multimediavt]

...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.

IT? It depends on what...

[davidsyes]

The definition of IT IS.....(LOL)

Can you not do exactly the same as your boss did?

[hobbit]

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!

Exactly!

[King_TJ]

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".....

Re:Exactly!

[Lershac]

or fire you.

Re:Exactly!

[pthor1231]

If I got fired for being on vacation that was approved, I wouldn't really want to work there anyhow. Employees now are way too willing to work on their vacations. Take the vacation and leave the computer, turn off the company cell phone.

87 hours per year

[plopez]

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.

Doesn't anyone read Dilbert anymore?!?

[mkcmkc]

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.)

Looking back by looking forward

[fuckinshitmotherfuck]

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!

Just leave

[Rand Race]

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.

Take a week off.

[Shaltenn]

Take a week off. Both of you.

Come back the next week, see how much the production figures dropped, then say "That's how much we're worth." :P

In terms of units or moneys, can't be those results.

Your Friend, the Risk Analysis

[autophile]

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.

Prove ITs Existence in Latin

[An dochasac]

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.)

Count repetitive tasks and common stupid user tric

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

How do I justify IT?

[HardCase]

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.

That's Easy -- Take a 2 Week Vacation

[Hutz]

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.

Show your hours as billed by a contractor

[Omanisherin]

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.

Bad Idea

[FooGoo]

Usually, I don't recommend doing something like this unless management is asking for it. You should not have to justify your existence...you already have a job. When management gets the numbers just beware that when the next salesman comes in you may get outsourced.

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.

Re:Get Outsourcing Quotes

[Bandman]

Ironically, I just got done doing that, and it's cheaper for me to outsource hosted Exchange with BBES than it is to host it, especially when you consider that I have no idea how to admin it and would have to hire a contractor to do the initial setup and I would have to get trained.

Install Linux?..

[MadMax]

It pretty much looks after itself, distro is unimportant.

Justify

[danaan]

I'd left justify it, like this: the Existence of IT

mod parent up!

[citylivin]

hilarious!

Take a month-long vacation

[mizzouxc]

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.

Bring in a Consultant

[brainee28]

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.

Simple, direct answer to bakamaki's question

[quux4]

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.

Just measure it using the work of everyone else

[Sir Mal Fet]

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.

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.

Re:Cost reduction illusions

[Grishnakh]

That is like staying single cause the hookers are cheaper then a wife. Which is a lot of what is wrong with America today.

For a lot of men, they'd actually probably be better off with hookers rather than their wives. A wife who makes you miserable and drains your bank account with a shopping addiction, for instance, isn't more valuable than a hooker.

Just like hiring contractors (like for IT services), or hiring employees, you have to be selective in choosing people, and don't get stuck with bad ones, because they won't just be less valuable than another, they'll actually bring you down with all the damage they cause.

As for your household staff rather than automatic machines, machines don't steal your stuff, while household staff is famous for that. Here in Arizona, it's pretty common for Mexican housekeepers to case houses for burglaries. You don't have to worry about your dishwasher helping to rob your place. The more people you have involved in an operation, the more chances you have for something to go seriously wrong.

So... Break it

[Colin Smith]

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.
 

Re:The devil is in the details -- Get some metrics

[bigchiz]

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.

IT Time Spent

[DVSD91]

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 like a consultant

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

outsourcing is the answer

[v1]

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.

How?

[darth dickinson]

Take a week's vacation and don't answer cellphone or emails.

Results-Oriented Analysis

[dontmakemethink]

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.

Do they really need you?

[Bilbo]

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....

Re:Do they really need you?

[rob1980]

Exactly. If these folks don't know how to value your continued employment, let them see what happens when you're not there for a few weeks.

Re:Do they really need you?

[Bilbo]

The risk, of course, is that they WON'T miss you, in which case it might be time to move on to another position, or with another employer. This is very rare, but not impossible. If you want to keep an interesting, rewarding job, then you need to be in a place where people need you, not where you're just an IT "janitor".

Human IT support is priceless

[Mutatis Mutandis]

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.

PHB-fu

[OverflowingBitBucket]

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.

Justify your expense.

[Plowd]

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.

What good is a phone call

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

Mr. Anderson, if you cannot speak?

Just refer to MTBF figures for the hardware

[Brandano]

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!

Re:Just refer to MTBF figures for the hardware

[carlzum]

I wish I had some mod points, that's an excellent suggestion. Sound cost-benefit analysis based on reliable, published figures is the best argument. If you don't provide it, a consultant or outsourcing vendor will.

Every business unit, from operations to sales, is evaluated based on their productivity. Management has a hard time measuring IT because it involves more than dividing widgets by workers. Providing them with standard hours of service and the alternative cost is one way to help demystify it for them.

Another idea.

[ewieling]

My suggestion is to go on vacation for a couple of weeks. Then ask your boss how much you are worth. Quite simple really.

Maybe also

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

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!

Simple

[crossmr]

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.

Useful book

[martin_the_geek]

Look at http://www.amazon.com/What-Business-Really-Wants-Collaborative/dp/0750660961/ref=ed_oe_p

Easy

[ignavus]

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've got a better idea...

[eh2o]

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.

Good thing he gave you the hard job!

[salemnic]

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

holiday

[Eil]

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?"

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.

Relevant Costs and IT

[yerxa]

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

Role of sysadmin

[ResidentSourcerer]

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.

Re:The devil is in the details -- Get some metrics

[Griffon26]

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.

Quite simple actually

[BlueTrin]

Just do a breakdown analysis, of yourself versus other solutions.

Other solutions include:

• Hiring contractors
• Outsource the support
• Remove the support (sacking yourself)

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.

MSU

[g33z3r]

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).

That is not my job.

[jotaeleemeese]

And I would not work in a company asking me such a thing, unless it was to get started a new IT department.

Equate Break/fix to employee time lost

[JFilz]

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...

Proactive Approach

[banished]

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.

Nobody likes....

[rgviza]

...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

schmizafaloongs

[i621148]

Show how all those schmizafaloongs you perforborizatle consistently save the company from exploding on a daily basis.