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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.
Cutting the IT budget means one of two things - someone is looking for a promotion or the company is going bad.
In both cases it's time to look around for a new job.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
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.
Make a strong business case to support the budget levels you actually need. It may be that 10% or even 20% reduction isn't a bad idea. If you can't support your "needs" with a business case, you don't need it.
"Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup."
As much as I would never want to see any of those presentation slides or spreadsheets with all the reasons why you are doing as well as can be expected, I would still expect you to be able to put such things together in some sort of reasonable business argument. But I suspect that it's not your 'gut' telling you that everything is fine, that's ignorance. I certainly understand the perils upper management meddling in affairs of which they know nothing, but I also understand middle management resting on their laurels and thinking they're doing 'just fine' without any way to try and judge that metric.
Getting a baseline on what similar departments might be spending can sometimes be helpful. But your goal shouldn't just be to find some metrics by which you compare favorably to the competition and judge that everything is fine. Every time you have to sign off on a purchase order for new hardware or renew a license for software you should be asking questions about value. Change by itself is never without risks, so the mere disruption of existing workflows might be reason enough not to switch to some alternative, even what that alternative is 'clearly' better.
You should be able to make your case for all your spending, such as why it's needed and why it's the best choice for your business. It doesn't always boil down to easy numbers for the bean counters, but at least be able to put on a good show.
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
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.
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.
You are giving the person tooooo much credit!
Look it - I've been there - HIS boss is telling him to cut costs and HIS bonus is riding on it. Got it?
HIS BONUS.
I'm gonna tell you right now what he'd say to you - "You need to work with less." with a look of he doesn't want to hear anything and if you don't like it, there's the door.
Yours,
-AC, MBA
You may also want to show what alternatives cost, along with pros/cons. For instance, if you use Amazon cloud services, show what the costs would be to switch to two of Amazon's competitors and any performance improvements/losses that would occur. You'll either be able to show that Amazon is the best bang for the buck, or you'll find part of the savings you need.
The problem is that you need to convince them. If this person was competent, he would already know what the budget is spent on and that it is mostly not spent on traditional IT. You can try to make a cost inventory and show that. With luck this idiot will realize he is out of his depth with regard to the non-traditional spendings and that the traditional spendings are pretty low. If that does not work, I recommend finding an employer who dose not put cretins into directorial positions. Also remember that cutting necessary IT spendings (as this guy is about to do) will make working conditions a lot worse and people will start to leave, the best and brightest first. If that happens, the days of your company are numbered.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I don't agree.The resignation letter is a smart move, but don't be honest about the reasons, fabulate something about new opportunities or the like, so he cannot give you the shaft for telling him the truth, namely that he is incompetent.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
50% sounds like [s]he either pulled it out of their ass or like someone else mentioned - the financial situation is dire. Like most discussions, you want to frame the conversation in the best possible way for you to win it. In your case, I would work with your boss to re-frame the discussion around cutting the right part 50%. Moving all engineering related expenses to line of business accounts would be a good first step, then you can take a look at the real enterprise IT. Of what remains, consider what you can outsource within the limits allowed by applicable security and regulatory constraints. Of the IT enabling expenses in line of business accounts, consider what portion of those are O&M vs new expenditures. Can new expenditures be deferred without impacting productivity/revenue? Can you consolidate, outsource, or invest/buy-down continual obligations (it's amazing how many orgs won' consider that b/c they're too short sighted)? Ensure each of those areas is related to an overarching business strategy ... that's your justification for those areas. Make sure that the linkage includes a rough discussion about the revenue/productivity impact of each area both for new purchases/continual obligations for both the engineering and enterprise IT expenses.
Obviously, you're not going to cut 50% of all IT spending and still have the full level of effectiveness and efficiency, not within a FY. Perhaps you should consider a more phased approach?
There are things where no good metrics exist. This seems to be one of them. In fact, most "metrics" used in business today do not deserve the name, they are so bad.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
However, it may be possible to cut costs by 50% if you have some expensive bad practises.
Let me give you an example. We replaced our old Dell Workstations - these were £2500 each, with newer, better units (Dell T3600s) for around £1100 a unit. There. In a single phase we cut more than 50% and the new units are not in any way a step backwards. IT costs can/do fall over time, so I'd argue initially that taking a good look may not be as hurtful as initially it seems. Virtualisation and cloud are offering for some areas a seismic shift in workload and capacity and I think spending in some areas in terms of investment can harness good returns on the funding/cost side.
*In the above, I am not agreeing with cuts per se, but if they are there, and are viable, then it has sense to take some time with them and examine the cases.
We`re all equal
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 ...
1) Why why WHY is toner part of a *capital* budget? That is like putting pencils in a capital budget. It's a basic office supply. Move it out of the capital budget, in the next budget cycle if you can't do it before. Because it's in capital, people will be much more inclined to believe that they can cut it or delay the expenditure, and it will be measured against the capital improvements (Rather than supplies) of other departments, and it will get more scrutiny.
2) If you haven't already, it's obviously worth standardizing to very few models of printers and finding toner from someplace reliable other than the manufacturer.
What strategy would you use
I would move some of the IT related spend into a different budgetary category.
I expect from your question that you are one of the junior members of the organisation. The management will already have made plans for some token cuts to non-essential areas (though that could still include you) and found ways to preserve their empires, and maybe even surreptitiously carve out a little more besides, with financial shenannigans - that's their job.
You new director doesn't actually want any reductions in overall spend - that would be silly. He/she/it just wants to look like they are making a splash as a new appointee. That's how they gain their reputation and more importantly: their bonus.
The only thing to look out for is if your manager is somewhat clueless in playing the game at this level and actually believes the diktat that's come down from on high. If so, just put in a transfer to a different department. Your boss will be too busy wondering what hit them to worry about you.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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!
How did this manager get to this 50% number? Was there a thorough end-to-end review with feedback and analysis from all stake holders? Or is this some half baked idea from reading vendors' web sites and intended to boost the new director's resume? You did not mention anything about a review so I suspect the latter.
You will never win this battle. I have never seen anyone win a battle like this. Bail out now and preserve your reputation. But before you go share your concerns with as many high level managers as you can.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
You do realize that outsourcing at this size is very expensive, do you? Probably not. Outsourcing at this size cannot cut cost and provide the same level of quality, because the additional layer of communication actually increases cost. Hence outsourcing will either be more expensive or massively reduce quality.
I have seen that several times. Jobs that were critical would before be done by two experiences, senior engineers to make sure they would be done right. After outsourcing, it was suddenly one junior person, that in addition did not understand the problem.
That is what outsourcing really does: Give you massively worse quality, but hide the fact. For a time.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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
8% may be low, just right or high depending on what else is in your "engineering budget". The 50% number is management BS. A number pulled out of someone's arse that is completely meaningless. You could just as easily spend more on engineering salary and grow the "engineering budget" to the magical 4% spending target as slash costs to the point you are out of business. Let me suggest the better approach to your manager. Look at where you are spending money, evaluate alternatives and if you see something offering a significant cost saving like say dropping expensive Microsoft Office licenses for Libre Office (especially in the engineering dept.) then make the decision to save some money.
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.
The first mistake you're making is trying to compare yourself with other engineering firms, which could easily be the same mistake your new IT director is determining your budget. You're asking 'how much do other engineering firms spend' when he could be thinking, "this is more than what my previous engineering firms have spent."
That and 'engineering' is far too broad a term to outright compare as some companies require hundreds of licenses for fluid dynamics modelling software at $10's of thousands of dollars per license.
The appropriate way to determine if you're spending too much, too little or just enough is to determine, specifically, what you need to function. Establish a per-PC baseline in terms of hardware (which may vary for certain departments), your refresh time for each area then then the required software that everyone needs then the additional software that certain departments need. You can also use the additional software suggested requirements as an additional baseline for hardware requirements. It may also be beneficial to stagger departmental refresh times to meet yearly budgetary requirements.
You should be providing information to your director to show "this is what we need to function and these are the costs" rather than trying to justify purchases based on comparisons. He can't dispute requirements... or perhaps there's a necessity for him to dispute requirements that people feel are requirements yet they're more of a want than a need, which is a typical experience at engineering firms.
Outsourcing: "We Cut Corners, So You Don't Have To!"
That's why management likes it - they can ink a deal, have some SLAs in there for a few critical things, and cut the budget overnight. Sure, the provider doesn't actually have interests that align with your organization's, and after a year or two - when you've had to pay them extra to do everything that your in-house people would have just done - it'll end up costing more per year, and maybe the firm is actually cutting corners in a way that would screw your business if something goes wrong. But senior management has deniability!
It's the same thing that leads clothing companies to contract with a supplier that contracts with dangerous factories in places like Bangladesh. A few steps removed, and it's not your fault that hundreds of people died in a fire or building collapse. How were you to know?
This almost certainly came from some sort of "how much do you spend on IT" survey. Split your normal IT spending from your Engineering hardware budget. Then compared to other industries, your IT is in line.
You know when you have cut IT spending too much. Its all pretty practical. When the cheap server crashes so regularly that its impractical to use, you know you spent too little. When you can't get staff in to fix cheap hardware because of overtime limits (or no overtime), and systems 'stay down' till late in the next business day, then you know your IT payroll budgets are too low. When you lose a significant of your revenue in a year because of data loss, you know IT has been cut too deeply. People suggesting cuts might 'tempt the waters' and 'lets see what happens when', and my get short term gain (and promotions), but long term pain can result. Also no one wants to go to work where everything is broken all the time, and the phone is blowing off the hook with angry people all the time. If IT gets cut too much, people leave, the mess is still there, the data borked, and if the IT people leaving have intimate knowledge, of systems, that loss can hurt a company more than staffers 'putting the boot in' and destroying swaths of data on their way out.
How in the world does anyone, anywhere recommend using HE or Amazon cloud for engineering work? No, seriously, how? At an absolute minimum you just gave out all your company's models, algorithms, and computational analysis programs to an outside company. At worst, those files are accessible by your direct competitors due to lax security at HE or Amazon. You just gave away all the years of engineering hours it took to create those programs and models.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
First of all, an organization where almost 50% of the staff (900 out of 2,000) is engineering sounds cool -- even most "technology" companies are much lower than that. When you consider marketing, sales, admin, HR, upper management, support, etc. it's easy to see why. But that's beside the point.
As others have said (and I'm saying this both as a guy whose been pitched to, and been doing the pitch), in a healthy organization, it just comes down to numbers (dollars, man hours, etc.) When I've been the decision maker, if a decent business case can be made for the spending, assuming the money is even possibly available, I'll go to bat and advocate (or just approve if I'm in that position). Things like monitors, faster computers, etc. translate pretty nicely into engineer productivity. And I've usually had data to back that up.
When I've been the one asking for money, I try to give 2 or 3 different "models" or scenarios, with anticipated costs and anticipated savings (or increase in productivity), **along with** ways that I believe we can demonstrate/measure the benefit. Just saying "We'll be 25% more productive" is vague and wishy-washy. Saying, "We think we'll cut 3 weeks off of this next 4 month cycle" is something that can be measured during & after the effort. Obviously, you don't just want to make stuff up, but if the numbers are grounded in reality, go for it.
For the stuff I do, it's usually not computers or software, it's oscilliscopes, logic analyzers, simulators, etc. But the result is the same: better equipment/tools should have a quantifiable benefit. Then there is a rational, unemotional basis for discussion. And even better, when you don't get what you've proposed, and things go sideways (usually schedule), you've got a paper trail documenting what you proposed as an alternative.
I would mod you up (except for the stupid mod system that means I never have mod points when I want to mod).
Sadly this is "business" 21st century style ~ 50% politics, 10% luck, 10% corruption, 30% actual work. Many failing companies could be turned around in short order by removing the top heavy bonus culture for a more equitable system (e.g. look at Germany for a viable model) with all the long term benefits that brings but in cultures where next quarters earnings report matters more than whether the company will still be in business in 10 years, thats never going to happen.
Not just that... different companies/universities work differently from others. For some universities, things like toner for those printers, servers, etc would come out at departmental/college level, with no real traceback to who is using what. If the prince professor of the department wants five servers and you are forced to take them out of your budget, server pool, etc. instead him or his team having to budget for them, chances are your boss is going to drop the pain on your shoulders as opposed to leave that prince professor screaming about how his vision is being thwarted. At others, the prince professor, like everyone else, submits budgets from which said items would come. Sure, it may just be a single line item by the time it reaches his boss or his boss's boss, but when that prince professor has spent $4000 on toner cartridges and either has to beg for more, or figure out where in his internal budget his next toner cartridges will be purchased...
Of course, right along with this is the stupidity of "if you don't spend it, you loose it next year" is pure southbound ejecta from a northbound male bovine. If partway through a year I realize that large expense will be needed next year, and I cut back on expenses somehow during the remainder of that year (maybe by using mass transit and staying at a much less expensive hotel instead of getting a room at the hotel where a conference is being held which was in my budget originally), I should not be penalized. But sadly, way too many universities, governmental agencies, etc. think that this should be the case.
Helping build UN*X and the Internet since 1981.
You didn't mention software licenses. CAD software, modeling software, computing platforms can cost thousands of dollars per seat per year. Stuff like Solidworks or Pro/E or MATLAB are incredibly expensive, I can't imagine that it's stuff like hardware that costs the most. And companies probably ARE spending too much on software. They'd be far better served by having, say, industry organizations commission high-quality software (perhaps open-source) instead of paying the annual Solidworks or Pro/E tax. Unfortunately, this is a big collective action problem. But that's not to say it can't be done!
As much as it's fun to pick on management, they're probably right: Engineering software licenses are obscene.
That is a description of a company going bad. FYI, the result you have had to how you approach this issue is pure luck IMHO. The only places this works (and even then it is not failsafe) are in really huge companies that have a lot of inertia. But even they die if this type of behaviour keeps up.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
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.
What nice view you have of us. We print on our own printer because:
1) the big printer is busy again printing some courses and you need it now
2) it's confidential
3) the big printer is too far or needs a special code against your department
Moreover, if you don't give them their printer or cartridge, it's not as if they don't have the budget to buy it on own costs. If your Dean cuts costs, just tell everyone the personal printer is on own expenses, many unis work like that. Uni's are not like companies because although cash flow comes from external parts, many profs have their own cash flows via grants, and because many unis are run by the profs. Could be different for you off course.
About personal stuff, I see a lot of it on the big copier/printer too, it's not like people around here are ashamed to do that. The copier has better print quality apparently.
You appear to be alluding to the University of California. If so,
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.
is not remotely true. That decision is made at the campus level with respect to internal accounting controls. Consumable materials and operating expenses are two additional budget lines available, and cost transfers through internal recharge are more than possible for departmental special requests. Your hands may be tied, but you should look to your AVC/Chancellor for the reason why, not the state, UCOP, or the Regents.
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!
It's clearly trivial to cut IT costs by 90%, while only increasing other costs by only 7 or 8% -- reclassify IT costs not related to office work to the engineering budget. You'll have world-beating IT costs of only 0.8% of total engineering budget.
If you think you can replace pr software like Solidworks or Pro/E or MATLAB by getting "industry organizations commission high-quality software" cheaply you obviously have no idea what is involved.
My first job was at just such a place for CFD you think will be cheap - we spent the cost of a small house on a single bit of HP instrumentation gear (this is before they sucked)
Indeed. "Reduce 50%" doesn't give much information, more of a general guideline, unless someone likes magic; and it also speaks of someone who is issuing orders with zero knowledge of the damage they will cause. A smarter approach would have been "Could you review our current contracts with vendors, and see if we couldn't renegotiate some of them, or find new vendors for the same items, albeit at a lower cost? No sense paying $75 / CAL, when we can get them for $50 / CAL from someone else. Should be we paying $500 / license for VS 2012 Professional, when we can get VS 2012 Premium for $250 / license? And who decided that we were going to pay the OEMs to install an extra 4GB of RAM in each of the new workstations for $200 per machine?"
I am John Hurt.
Not only that, they are not factually sound, because they typically ignore critical things and make the bean-counters think they understand what is going on, when they in fact have no clue. Understanding your business is not optional for a manager, it is mandatory. No available metric can replace it.But you have to have true understanding of the real word to see that, hence the MBAs cannot.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well you can toss a box on the table marked 'employee tools' containing a calculator, a pad of paper and a box of pencils and then ask the 'boss' how much work he thinks the department will get done....
I try to make sure that all the equipment in our labs is designated as Test Equipment and not 'IT' stuff. Lots of modern test equipment incorporates computers, but the goober who installs the anti-virus suite is NOT getting near it. If you have the test equipment networked, keep it on a separate network from the 'IT' stuff and completely isolated from the Internet. Also prohibit non-tech people from having access on it.
By partitioning your 'test equipment' away from IT, you can keep it out of the IT budget.
Or some place that makes contact with white paper several times per day...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It makes you question the validity of the first half.
MS Outlook has improved a great deal and can sync with a very wide range of mail server software.
Your example was probably obsolete thirteen years ago. Please discuss things seriously instead of just throwing up rubbish.
The worst I saw, in a steelworks two years before it was shut down, was the metric of "tonnes of steel per man hour". The graphs showing that metric just kept going up and up as profits kept going down. Various managers were gaming the system with poorly trained contractors whose hours did not show up in the metric, maintainance was cut back, and downtime costs did not show up since people were sent home. In the end the gamed metric of "tonnes of steel per man hour" was at a very impressive number when orders could not be filled, sales were down and the entire place with sixty thousand staff was running at a loss instead of the impressive profit three years prior. The manager responsible for that moved on to wreck another part of the company and the ruins of the entire thing were picked up at a bargain price by some Swiss bankers.
Indeed. Why these criminally incompetent economy-wreckers do not end up in jail with their personal assets seized to pay at least for some of the damage is beyond me. Terrorism is peanuts in comparison.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I am not so sure. I think anybody of any reasonable skill level had already left Yahoo at that point, so this decision, while stupid, may not actually have much impact. And said blonde will still get a ton of money out of this, even if she completely fails. We need personal liability for mismanagement and everything besides a small base-level salary tied to long-term success. Maybe that would cause managers to actually start to care about doing it right again. At the moment, they optimize a few quarters, get a huge bonus and move on. That cannot work out well, no matter what.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You didn't mention engineering software licenses. Those can be ridiculously expensive.
But if you are spending the bulk of 8% of your *engineering* budget on computing hardware, then yes, you probably are spending too much.
Apparently, it is also a very old problem. Just found this:
"A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers." - Plato
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
For the cost of one year of her salary, how many people could they send through business school themselves and just pick the best one when the dust settles?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Most organizations spend about 4% of their gross in IT, so most probably the new director think that this division should also spend that much,
and has little clue what an Ingeneering company really does.
Now apparently the company is really spending a low less than 1% in "traditional IT", maybe some is hidden in other part of the organizations (things like payroll, accounting, big ugly SAP or Oracle Financials kind of stuff) and the real cost is really higher, or the IT staff has a harder time baboozeling engineers that the average MBA into spending large amount of money into big exchange/sharepoint/AD or similar junk.
So the obvious solution to your problem is the following: restructure your division so that IT is sitting on one side with their mail and web and hr etc... servers with a low 3% of all cost.
Restructure the "big iron" into a billable commodity, that means that you define a set of "approved vendors" define a cost per "compute unit", a "recommender margin" and add it to any bill or product cost cheat.
And split the purchase of any ingeneering work station into : no brand box, big intel CPU, large screens, just make sure that each component is bellow the line where it counts a "investment", so you can hide it into the "pen, pencils and chairs" "consumables costs" linked to a specific project costs.
So you will end up only spending a little bit more than before, while looking at "over performing" at cost cutting.
And if you do it right, it'll even make somewhat sense as you'll end up with a closer monitoring of the real costs of each project, and most probably some teams will be somewhat more prudent in purchasing stuff since they will have to balance the hassle of doing the paper work vs using the station they allready have.
So unless you'll make the paper work so hard that even legitimate purchase look more trouble than honing one's CV you'll get some performance gain.
Good luck
We're a 1,700 employee regional government organization (analogeous to county). Engineering (paired with Construction) is one of our largest divisions, probably about 600 employees, with 200 of them being Engineers.
As that aspect is pretty opaque, dealing with pipes and water and sewage treatment (even if the org itself is pretty under-the-radar), the engineers get pretty much what they want. Large Monitors, Top Spec computers every 18 months, latest versions of AutoCad and other CAD programs, dedicated IT resources to get and keep everything running.
The 10 person GIS team of the IT department is pretty much at their beck and call as well.
Karma: Can only be portioned out by the Cosmos.
uehm.. that's what he was asking. that's what the entire ask is actually about. the percentages at other companies are highly irrelevant though because he has engineering costs in the same bin.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
I'm going to guess that he died from analogy....
(Read it aloud. You'll get it....)
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
What nice view you have of us. We print on our own printer because: 1) the big printer is busy again printing some courses and you need it now 2) it's confidential 3) the big printer is too far or needs a special code against your department
1) If the big printer is frequently busy with big jobs, then there should be a printer specifically for those big jobs. Also, with modern printing software, the print can be piched up at any printer (badge printing), so if one printer is busy, find another one.
2) Not a problem. Lots of solutions exist, and all printers I know of will let you specify a PIN which needs to be entered at the printer to get the print out (default setting at our company)
3) If it needs a special code against the department, then I would assume the department has given out that code. How is that a problem?
The wage cost is quite high here, and people are busy, busy, busy. Walking and waiting is not high on the list of things to do.
When we set our budget this year, we researched and found that the national average for IT budgets according to CIO.com and couple of other sources (all self reported, though) was 5.2% of the company gross. I would sit down with the corporate comptroller or CFO and find out where you should be. It sounds like most of your expenditures are directly related to product (and if the use any form of cost accounting internally) should be able to trace directly to your expenditures. Remember, if after the analysis things look even better than 5.2% then promptly point out your exceptional leadership and ask for a raise...
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
This.
The mediocre intellect is running the world. And we are allowing them.
I'd get together with other managers (I assume you're one), and set up a budget discussion meeting. Then, I'd assume that he was expecting you to give a whatsitcalled, zero-based budget? where you start from zero, not from what you have. Perhaps a compare-and-contrast of zero-based and what you have now.
Heh, and, of course, if you went more heavily into Linux, with low-to-nothing licensing per workstation.... Esp. since you say you're an engineering organization, as good or better tools all run on Linux.
mark, at a civilian US government agency that does research, including with clusters....
ObDisclaimer: this is my opinion, and not that of a) my employer, b) the Agency I work for, c) the US federal gov't, or d) the view out my window (as if I had one).
Calmly explain that computers run on binary -- ones and zeros. Simply ask him, with the proposed 50% reduction, which should be axed, the ones or the zeros?
Just doubling the salaries will get you to 4-6 %.