Don't yield to the temptation to put forth fuzzy numbers--doing so will damage your credibility. Good managers will listen to benefit studies, even if there is no immediate and direct payoff. Simply indicate the potential long-term or indirect payoff, cost avoidance or time savings you'd feel comfortable explaining to someone while looking them in the eye.
Again, top management is used to listening to--and funding--projects that don't necessarily have 100 percent payoff potential. Just look at any advertising campaign, the opening of a new branch office and staff expansions. Legislative mandates, such as Graham-Leach-Bliley (for financial privacy), the Patriot Act (which affects intelligence-information gathering) and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), might turn into a repeat of Y2K's "kid in a candy store" days, but be careful: The economy isn't what it used to be, and more top managers are becoming IT savvy. Whatever the initiative, the key is to be disciplined in how you present your case.
Even in a legislative environment that places many mandates on the banking industry, Ron Trent, vice president of network services and chief information security manager for Hudson United Bank, still must carefully justify his upgrades. With 2,500 desktops, 290 servers, 215 remote offices and an IT staff of 13, Trent says he relies on a cookie-cutter approach to keep levels of service and security high.
This need for standardization is part of what's pushing Hudson United's desktop upgrades in the next 12 months. As vendors supply fixes and updates, "more and more of the departmental applications aren't supported on Windows 95, like our AP and loan-approval applications," he says. "We're forced to move to Windows 98 at the very least for that department. Little by little we end up with a hodgepodge of different areas with different platforms."
In a case like this, an IT manager faces with a difficult decision: Hire more staff to deal with the increased complexity of support workload, which is an ongoing expense, or make the case for standardization. From the perspective of a very small staff supporting a large network, Trent thinks they've made the correct decision. Some managers try to compare the variable and ongoing costs of hiring more staff to the fixed cost of the upgrades, but be careful: When you compare costs, you assume that you have the choice of hiring more staff. Obviously, that's not always true, and if you make that assumption, you may get snickered at (or worse). In this case, it might be better to simply focus on quality of service.
Death by Committee
If you do not manage your IT dollars well, expect them to be managed for you; that's the dysfunctional management trend that's been surfacing at some large companies. By way of warning, we relate what an insider at one large New York-based investment bank tells us about a new process where IT requests must make their way through two virtual "gates," or committees.
The committees make decisions about whether the request is "strategic" and gets funded or "non-strategic" and doesn't get funded.
"Right now," says our source, "there's a lot of money going into Microsoft Project, and reams of paper, PowerPoint presentations and very expensive people working on this." To fund the initiative, IT dollars have been taken away from basic needs, such as coding and system administration, and long-term IT employees have been let go in favor of consultants who will ostensibly heal the funding pain.
The problem with working on a purely strategic, consulting-oriented plane (the "36,000-foot view," as the consultant buzzword has it) is that it's hard to get things done when resources are taken away from tactical areas. As our source says, "You've got to eventually land the plane and get it done without resources and without good people."
Worse, "Users can make requests, but if it's not deemed strategic, it's deemed contract [outside of IT's duties]. Then the users feel they're getting ignored." And when users feel ignored, that's the first step in an IT department's death spiral because, ultimately, IT is about business, and business is about making profits, and profits don't ever happen without filling the needs of real people.
Jonathan Feldman is chief technical manager of the Chatham County Government in Savannah, Ga., and a Network Computing contributing editor. Write to him at jf@feldman.org.
Post a comment or question on this story.
RSS
