2003-12-16, 07:27 PM
Certainly it is not just I that think business in America has gone sour. My main focus for this topic, is going to be in the IT world, and how Big Business has gone bust.
Working as a full time network administrator for a hospital and clinic's I have learned much about running an IT budget, and the do's and dont's of spending your monies. However, after careful thoughts, and ideas I still have to come to the conclusion that every CEO and CFO has to have some working idea of how important the technology age of our future is.
As I sit behind my little desk and type this story, I've got some interesting points that I would like to touch upon. Some facts that might give you some insight on how IT budgets are proposed, and who infact is proposing those budgets.
First let us analyze our Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Although good with numbers and financial decisions this person normally does not quite understand the TCO for IT. Most CFO's will have to do a case study on why you need another person, or why you need to upgrade your servers, why you need redundant power supplies, etc. This is the first and foremost importance in the IT department.
First let us analyize staffing. Staffing is very important in the role IT plays. If you have non-technical people working on servers, you are going to have problems. When a company hires someone, they first look for technical skills. If they have a technical background then we can move on to the personality of the individual. Of course this is all after you've done your case study on why you need another tech.
If a department is understaff it is added stress to the already stressed IT departement. If something doesn't work right, it's the computers fault. We all know everyone has done away with "Garbage in, Garbage out." I feel that is almost rather non-existent in todays society. It is not longer the users that are being blamed, but rather the IT staff, and computers. So by adding to the stress level by being understaff, the IT department gets angry easier. They get more on the defensive, causing users, to get defensive.
As you can see there is an issue that needs to be dealt with. Cutting staff, doesn't help the issue. It "might" raise the profit margin, but actually by how much.
As stress increases, work decreases. Stress creates unhappy environment, which then can cause people to not want to come to work. With people not wanting to come to work, they may decide to look for another job. So their work level decreases again. I think that point has been made fairly clear.
In order to wrap this up quickly I'm going to skip to why people need to be technically savy to run a business.
1. Stress = Loss of people
2. Loss of people = Loss of $$
3. Loss of people = Loss of production
4. Loss of production = Loss of $$
5. Loss of production = Loss of profit
6. Loss of profit = Loss of jobs
7. Loss of jobs = loss of team moral
8. Loss of team moral = loss of more $$
I certainly think that these principles apply to more than just IT, however, IT controls the cashflow. Sure, they can do it on paper, sure they can do without a computer. However, TCO, for all of that is much higher than if they would hire someone for the extra help.
Bleh... o_O
I'm tired now.....