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How Do You Justify the Existence of IT?
bakamaki writes "I work for a small manufacturing company as a SysAdmin. My boss is a DBA. We are the only IT employees. He recently decided to record hours spent on his projects and then evaluate how much time the databases he writes save the employees. Then he translates that into a $ figure. He's asking me to do something similar but I'm kinda at a loss. It seems most of the stuff I do is preventative, IE care and feeding of servers and network infrastructure in addition to all the break fix stuff I do for the user base with their desktops. When in this position what do you folks usually do?"
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.
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.. 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.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Develop a worse-case scenario. Detail all of the problems that may occur without your system maintenance work (system hijacking, malware, trojans, client info loss, etc), and then write the amount of money each of these theoretical problems would cost the company. now add all those costs. i'm pretty sure you make less than whatever figure you end up getting. buena suerte
When my Karma level reaches 0 I feel in piece with the Universe
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?
Your CEO should buy a Mac for everyone in the company and fire the whole IT department.
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.
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.
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).
lucm, indeed.
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.
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