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Ask Slashdot: IT Spending In Engineering?
An anonymous reader writes "I work in the engineering division at a large organization, about 2000 people total and about 900 in the engineering division. As I'm sure many institutions have been faced with recently, we are dealing with reduced budgets. We have a new director who has determined that the engineering division spends too much on 'IT' and has given us a goal of reducing IT spending by 50%. We currently spend about 8% of the total engineering budget on IT related purchases. About 10% of that (i.e. 0.8% of the total budget) is spent on what I consider traditional IT such as email, office automation software, etc.. The rest goes towards engineering related IT such as clusters for large computations, workstations for processing, better networks to handle the large data sets generated, data collection systems for testing facilities, etc.. My gut says that 8% is low compared to other engineering institutions. What do other engineering organizations spend on IT (traditional and engineering)? What strategy would you use to convince your management that 8% spending on IT is already very efficient?"
Management exists to tell you what you need and how much you can have, not to ensure that you have what you really need to do your job efficiently.
Also, enforcing a budget cut will probably get someone promoted yet another level beyond his competence.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Put together a presentation to show your new director how you spend your monies - judging by your estimates, it's safe to say that you aren't quite sure how your department spends it's money. Put it in graphs, in a spreadsheet, make a chart, whatever you need to in order for your new director to understand where the budget goes. But, if you don't know yourself, you can't defend your stance. Itemize it and break it down, learn where all that $$$$ goes so you can prove that it goes somewhere worthwhile - if it doesn't, propose to cut it, and make changes where you can. You don't have to hit the 50% if you can convince him/her that 1) you aren't wasting money and 2) you can find places to help save money.
Like a good resume: don't just say what you do or how you do it, but explain why and how it helps the company. "We use these clusters for the larger computations" vs "We use these clusters for larger computations, which save us 30% on time and help boost productivity compared to when we didn't have them" yadda yadda.
I think I good approach would be to identify and present options to management for reducing that 8% down to 4%. Done honestly, recommending eliminating waste and increasing productivity of higher-priority services, and recommending the elimination of lower priority services altogether, this will give management an understanding of the cost to the organization of reducing the IT budget as requested. It is then up to management to decide whether they want to proceed.
Approaches that involve trying to tell management that they are wrong, or stupid, or don't know what they are doing aren't likely to go over well with management unless you can identify some factor that management isn't considering (yet). Unless one is in management, its not one's job to make those decisions. It is one's job to provide information to management so that they can make informed decisions.
He has come into a new organisation and needs to find out who's who. He needs to identify the competent managers (AKA threats), the lazy ones, and the idiots. A good way to do that is to drop a problem on the organisation, then sit back and see how it plays out. It's more of an exercise in office dynamics than a budgetary cut.
What the OP needs to do is adopt a similar position. See which teams and departments come out of this change ahead of the game and which ones are the losers. Then make sure he nails his colours to the right mast and wait for the next step up the career ladder.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
At the university there are only two kinds of budgets: capital and personnel. We have money for salaries, and money for equipment. Those are the categories. You may disagree with their method for doing it, but it is set by the regents and the state and it not something we control. Basically our personnel budget isn't being reduced, in fact there are small state mandated raises coming. However the equipment budget has only been 33% approved.
Personally I don't think toner should be an IT item, it should be in the same category as office supplies which is a department budget the business managers have. However, it is in the IT budget and that is that. We don't control it.
In terms of printers we have little control over that. We aren't like most IT shops where we can tell people what it is. We have to do what they want, by and large. Were it up to me, people wouldn't have personal printers, they'd use the large floor combo copier/printers which have much cheaper consumables on account of being so large. However they don't do that because:
1) They are lazy.
2) They use their printers for non-work related uses. We can audit the departmental stuff, not so for the personal stuff.
You have to remember that universities operate rather differently from companies.