Justifying IT Spend (Ewwww…)

So I spent late this afternoon in a meeting with our AVP, the desktop Build manager, my boss and the desktop product manager. This was the second round of this meeting trying to find justification for MDOP which leads to SA which leads to EA which gives us Windows 7 Enterprise. Let me just be the first to say that I hate dealing with finances. I'm not very good at them (or math in general for that matter) and because of this I'm not in the least bit interested. I automate things (Windows 7, application installs, etc.) because I'm inherently lazy and most technical concepts are easy for me. This eventually leads me down the path of rationalizing to myself (and in this case those around me) that deciding whether or not to spend a couple million dollars should be simple and that we must just be making it too complicated.

I'm pretty sure that's what made my AVP frustrated with me.

I've thought about this most of the afternoon and I think it comes back to the work my boss and I have been doing over the past two years to build and manage the desktop service catalog. First we sat down and tried to list every piece of technology in the desktop space (easy). Then we tried to list out every one of our service offerings (much harder). Basically these are what I call "The Sears and Roebuck Catalog" of things people can order at our drive through window. These things then roll up into higher level services that we offer which are just local groupings of our service offerings. We realized later that these service offerings also roll down into the processes that drive them and the technology that depends on those processes. When we listed out the processes, we realized an awesome thing; that we could then list with each process the type (pay band) of resources required to execute that process.

Tying together the four hard to make (and extremely boring) lists I described in the yuckiness above gives you the ability to do one very cool thing. Automate easily justifying buying (or not buying) that new totally shiny thing that's gonna make the world awesome.

If putting in a new piece of technology affects 7 processes related to two service offerings by making the processes easier to execute or allows new processes that make service offerings better or create new service offerings then you have a pretty good idea of what money the technology is going to same and what kind of value the technology might bring to a particular service offering.

For example, you see an awesome new application compatibility tool that will automatically make a first pass at installing applications in your production source share, interrogate what the application installs is trying to do and centrally store that information and provide reports, etc. You want to buy this thing because you see value but you can't quantify it or explain it to anybody else. You sit down for an hour with your handy, dandy customized business case maker above and do the following: Identify which technology(ies) it might replace, which processes it might affect and how it's going to affect those processes. Is it going to lower the pay band of the resource required to execute that process? Is it going to enable you to increase the volume of transactions for that process thereby allowing you to consolidate FTE? Is it going to allow you to create entirely new service offerings and their associated processes? Is there an expected volume for these new processes? When you reach the end of your hour, you should have the basic figures for business case and an idea of how to articulate value. Realize that I talk about FTE not just because I like firing people (on principal, not actually) but because you're now able to take that FTE and do more different, cool, new things assuming someone wants you to do those things…

I look at it as a rubix cube you can sit down, play with and see if something makes sense before you go building a slide deck. It also gives you an idea of what other groups (within or outside of desktop) you need to work with.

 

I need to finish building the rubix cube on Monday….

 

David---