The Dreaded IT Budget

How do you get more in your Budget? IT needs a bigger budget, this is how you get one:

First let’s understand what a budget it. Believe it or not, it’s not just a bunch of lines with descriptions of how much is going to cost the company. 

Actually, Each line item equates to a certain degree of risk.

Let me explain: take the example of the maybe in your budget you have an expense for the cost of each employees desk phone. Well, why is it there? Its there so that employees can easily and quickly use a well known device to communicate internally (in order to collaborate and make decisions) and also to communicate externally to get help (vendors) or get paid (clients). 

Why is it a risk? Well, It’s a risk factor. Someone can decide to reduce costs by removing desk phones (you remove the service contract, the hardware, maintenance and probably some configuration done by the IT team, so further reducing complexity and time setting up and managing - SMART!)

But by doing this and decreasing your cost you increase your risk. 

Remember this equation for later on (decreasing cost equals increasing risk). This isn’t always the case, we’ll get to that later and why it’s crucial to get your budget approved. 

But by taking away the phones and decreasing that cost you increase your risk because now what happens? Whats the alternative? Let’s say for example sake this decision was made in the 80s when only a few people had cellphones. The risk is that now clients can’t get in touch with you, you can’t communicate internally with your team to deliver a product or service adequately and it requires everyone to communicate in person. The risk is poor communication and collaboration and less sales because your business can’t communicate with your clients. 

Fast forward to today. The alternative is having everyone use their personal cell phones OR provide mobile phones for everyone but then thats an increase in cost. Say you want your employees to use their personal phones so you increase your cost with a stipend to share the load. Now you have a security problem, all business transactions are done via a personal device - increase risk factor. Now you have to create cell phone policies, acceptable use policies, BYOD policies and implement some kind of control system over those devices to mitigate the higher risk. 

Once you do this, you also need to understand the increase risk that lies between the costs you just changed but also the impact on your teams workload and workflow, the employee workflow and most importantly, culture. There is a high risk factor and impact to culture. Because this is less quantifiable and never seen on a budget it doesn’t get the credit it deserves. 

But it should! Now if you don’t have a department dedicated to culture, then this change will need to be discussed with the decision makers. 

Well done, you’ve not integrated yourself beyond the scope of just IT and entered into culture. (Well talk about that in the culture video). And you’re getting noticed for contributing beyond technology into the business, we’ll discuss that in the Getting noticed video.