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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?"
seriously, just start labeling your clusters and CAD sw purchases and such as plain engineering costs and not IT.
start only counting the generic information technology expenses as IT - email and word processing...
the percentages don't really compare between companies that well - if you were to compare against a firm that doesn't need clusters for engineering calculations for example...
of course the "right" thing to do would be to get the director to magically understand that you have plenty of engineering costs bundled up with the it budget.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Show what you'd lose at a 50% cut. Show him the things that they want to have, that would go away if they cut that much. Often people fail to appreciate what a budget is spent on and if it gets explained what they'll have to trade off they'll be more accommodating.
We may have to do just that where I work. The Dean has been fiddling with the budget again (he's really, really bad at budgeting) and has approved about 33% of our capital budget. He says he'll see if there's more money once the FY starts. Well if not, we are just going to have to make it clear what they don't get to have. Toner will be a big one, we spend almost a third of the budget on that because every professor just HAS to have their own personal printer (this isn't something we get to say no to). Well, those purchases will have to stop, departmental toner purchases only, and then only for academics and business needs. We'll identify the computer labs that are running Windows XP that cannot be upgraded to 7/8 that will need to be shut down next year when updates stop. There will be no new purchases of desktops for anyone unless their computer is just non-functional, no refresh. Etc, etc.
At that point, he'll likely decide that more budget is needed, and move money around (I haven't looked, but my suspicion is he's giving the advertising group more they are a black hole that always wants more). If not, we'll keep going on what we have, and services will be cut because there won't be the funds for it.
It can be very effective to not only show people what you give them, but what you won't be able to give them. A 50% cut is huge, that isn't the kind of thing where you "just make do with a little less" or "cut some minor things" that is where major services have to be cut out. Show him what those are. It is easy to say "I want a 50% cut," when you just look at the money side. When you see what you are going to lose, then it is not so easy.
Cutting the IT budget means one of two things - someone is looking for a promotion or the company is going bad.
Not necessarily. Even quite healthy companies are obsessed with cost cutting these days. The problem is, some management folks can't see that some costs are buying something of extreme value to the company. And they are cutting long term value for short term cost reduction
In both cases it's time to look around for a new job.
I take a different approach. Whenever I get higher level management who are out of their waters and inept at the helm, I just batten down the hatches and weather out the storm. They will soon be replaced. This method has never failed me, and I've been at my company for a long time. I've seen good executive move up . . . and bad ones getting the boot.
A younger colleague was asking me about an executive's plan of growth until 2015. The colleague was concerned that we could not reach this goal. I told him that the executive won't be around in 2015 anyway, and not to worry about it.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I wouldn't leave anything up to luck. It's all calculated long term strategy. And it has worked for 28 years in the same company. Although, I have moved somewhere else in the company, when I decided that one area was doomed.
In a big, healthy company, it is inevitable that you will get "infected" with a bad manager somewhere, sometime. I see it like a body catching a cold. Instead of "inertia", I like to think of a company as having a "immune system" to combat colds. If the immune system is strong enough, it will be able to get rid of the "cold", the bad manager.
However, if the top level of management all gets the Ebola virus, the whole company is going to bleed to death with them. I won't stay around if that happens.
Come back in two years, and ask me if I am still working for the same company . . . and, more importantly, if I have the same middle management, or if I am in a different are of the company. I'm curious myself about that answer!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!