How to get the investment you need to accomplish your strategy is the six million dollar question. In an era of IT and other budgets cuts, how can you argue for investment?
When I first developed the IT Strategy for Save the Children, part of the presentation to the senior management team were the time and cost estimates to make it happen. After all, we were going in a new direction and that meant new initiatives, especially for connecting all of our field offices.
One of the advantages in IT is that we have an abundance of data. Only the Finance department has more. How we use this data is critical to our success. What I suggest is creating a budget model that looks at the IT costs per person, per application and per project (more on projects later). If we are doing our jobs, then the costs per person-app should be going down. Notice the combination of people and applications. Adding new applications drives up costs, but efficiency gains drive down unit costs, which are the app costs per person.
Now when you gain support for new IT initiatives, you can run your model for these scenarios and show the impact on costs and the investment required.
You can also benchmark these costs against other organizations and business sectors in general. Gartner publishes and annual report that's useful [1].
If the organization buys into your strategy and supports its initiatives, then the investments costs should be clear. I once received a 25% increase in projects budget as a result. That's a rare event these days, but possible if you have the data to back it up. |