Who Pays for IT Infrastructure? Business projects!
Earlier this year, I attended a meeting where differences of opinion came out - all in a good natured way. We got into some interesting semantic discussions; some folks have a fairly absolutist way of thinking about IT investments and projects.
I insisted, for example, that an IT project whose sole purpose is to upgrade technology (to the latest version) was by itself not an important end - does not deliver direct business results. Sorry, but when money is tight, "keeping current" and maintaining technical support just sounds like insurance to most business executives, and now it's all about risk management, likely outcomes, and boy, these invoices are mighty large!
However, keeping your technology current can and should become part of business projects, which become the means to the technologists' end. Basically, we need to make business projects cover their infrastructure costs - and yes, sometimes you [the business project] are buying a group of servers that other applications will use (and not have to pay for). However, on the average, the business unit whose project has to absorb this cost at this time will typically take advantage of shared server / infrastructure capability that other groups have had to cover.
Besides, at the end of the day, it’s all the same money bucket anyway, right?
Labels: business value of IT
posted by James P. MacLennan at 8:54 PM
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