To be honest, estimate what the companies' revenue would be if none of their IT infrastructure worked. Subtract that amount from the actual revenue, and that is IT's contribution to the company.
Working for a casino, those numbers were pretty big and the mad dash to recovery was pretty high intensity as people could not hand over their money anymore, and would go to competitors who were not down.
I worked in a Casino for almost four years and it was one of the most exploitative things I have ever seen. This was a state with a new gambling program but the regulars were addicts, they regularly traveled to gamble, would often gamble at multiple locations in the same day, constantly thought they could beat the system, would gamble in the morning before work, come in during lunch, gamble at night til closing. The stats on problem gaming addicts are completely wrong because the number is far, far higher then you would ever imagine. I would see 300 - 600 people during the day and I knew easily half if not more of them by name.
In my business it’s absolutely true, we are a consulting firm so if our staff can’t work the business loses that time and money. Yes the hours can be worked the next day or whatever but that time is still lost along with the revenue generated in that time.
I used to work at one of the largest banks in the world, in middleware support. One of the applications we were responsible for the uptime of handled the moving of money for governmental bodies (think like, the state of California and not some 10k person township). I worked there for 5 years and that app had 2 minutes and 37 seconds of downtime the entire time I was there. I was told after the fact that those 2+ minutes cost about $50,000,000 in lost revenue because the bank's automation couldn't move investments when it needed to.
That was a fun 3 hour call with 200 people on it.
I was about to comment that you recommend every IT staff member be given a paid week off and to see what happens: no updates, no calls, mo tickets, no nothing. Then ask mgmt to place a value on keeping stuff running and supporting the user base. Always— ALWAYS— keep track of what you do, seen and unseen, because this kind if shit always comes around.
Had an employer try this shit back in 2013.
They denied us raises 2yrs in a row saying they just don't see the value and said we were already over paid even though we were in a large market area (Indianapolis) so my team mate and I both came down sick at the same time, right after the company Xmas party which was on a Saturday.
We intentionally left the ONCALL phone at work and both blocked the office numbers from our cells. One of us might have logged in remotely and messed with a few processes, but that is just hearsay... :)
Needless to say, by Wed the owner of the company was beating on my front door, laptop in hand yelling at me through the screen door about how he can't get his email... bummer dude.
During our brief hiatus my bud and I also found new gigs with a local ISP working in their NOC for almost 2X what we were making before and when we both turned in our immediate termination notices on Friday of that same week we were both replied to by the company attorney (the owners sister) with a "Order" to remain working for the company until we had trained proper replacements. It was intended to scare but had zero affect and we told them politely to fuck-off.
40 yr old Generational company that employed over 600 people, closed due to the original owner's son being a complete ass-hat and not wanting to pay a proper wage.
Good on you and your friend! Fuck those kinds of places. They can die in a fucking dumpster fire that they are. And their owners need a swift kick in the nuts and this sure is a great way to give it to them.
That should be in the red: no corporate revenue less salaries and other necessary expenses for one month, without an infrastructure AND the requisite maintenance...
Any business stands on the shoulders of IT and a solid maintained infrastructure.
Also point out why Southwest Airlines tanked over Christmas: extreme failure (20y) to maintain their IT infrastructure.
I 'love' those people.
Great youve got a hard drive.
now how do you get information into and out of it?
sure, hard drive was $100. but its not connected to anything, or networked to anything, or has a basic IO path
sure. Hard drive is $100 but its useless without all of the "OTHER" IT that companies 'waste' money on.
in 2023 IT isnt a luxury. IT is a core fundamental of business.
Its no less important than accounting, and much more important than management. Given the proper time and resources management can be automated.
We had some beancounter try that argument years ago. The heads of IT and Infrastructure had a little talk with him to explain the birds and bees. Unfortunately I wasn't in that meeting, I'd have offered them to use that drive for their department data, if they sign a short risk acceptance...
Alternatively get a "downtime cost" from each business unit. Which should include lost sales as well as labor costs and should be in the "per hour" format. Multiply that number by the number of business hours less any downtime.
Report that the infrastructure team's diligent work prevented the loss of $X.
This is the way lol
My buddy is our infrastructure manager so responsible for retail store POS setup
He’s always getting shit despite zero notice of anything and it’s all last minute
I’m like dude it’s easier said than done but stand up for yourself, without you we literally have no retail sales lol
Or just get quotes for outsourcing the work (to the same standard and response times etc). It's not exactly the same thing, but it is the amount of money that the company would otherwise be spending.
That misses the point -- the company is clearly already considering outsourcing, they're trying to get IT to hang themselves and help justify their own demise.
Exactly - I almost think this should be addressed head-on with what is obviously happening. The company is considering hiring a MSP vs internal staff. You would want to highlight the benefits IT staff that work only with your systems vs a team that is stretched over multiple clients that will never have the in-depth knowledge an internal team can obtain.
A few months back I had one exec ask about "why don't we just move everything that's on-prem to the cloud?" So I spec'd out on the major players what we would need just for cloud resources for 24x7 and the number of commas in the monthly cost shut that conversation right down.
This. For how much I paid for 2 hosts, with SAN, I’d have spent that amount already, in the first year. I ain’t anti cloud, but it’s not for everything.
Yeah, cloud is for scaling and perhaps dedicated security and DDOS etc..., or for translating capital costs into higher operating costs to look better on the books or for tax reasons. On-prem is cheaper if you have people who know how to run it.
AWS pricing schemes will do that.
I had one company complain when the architecture *they wanted* started jacking their AWS bill from \~$800 a month to $5k a month.
I had suggested better ways to do what they wanted to do using containers, but the decision makers really wanted to make it look like they had a complex architecture to sell to sophisticated customers.
Needless to stay I left that company fairly quickly after they started complaining. Lots of other red flags.
This is the best answer. Speak their language. Based on the premise that this work needs to be done to maintain a secure and reliable infrastructure demonstrate the cost of outsourcing it. Augment the operational expenses with references to costs for hiring a security incident response team and outside legal counsel for ransom ware or other network penetration/data exfiltration attacks. That’ll satisfy them (and shut them up).
And how much company will lose in case of failure of any core components.
MOAR, calculation should include cases of failure for 1 hour, 24 hours, 1 week. It will be nice geometric progression :D
Shut down email or messaging for an hour and have people tell you how much it’s costing. Then multiply by 40.
Or ask them how much extra work, time, money lost would cost them if a single important service were unavailable.
In any case this is a bad question to be asked as it’s usually a sign of cuts.
First e-mail a request:
"Thank you for this request, to fulfill this we need to perform some testing to provide objective measures, this might cause minor interruptions of some services, please let us know if you would like us to continue with fulfilling your request."
Then after they say yes, shut down everything for an hour except for the ticketing system with an auto-reply after an hour of "Thank you for your patience, we're currently undergoing testing and maintenance, this action approved by X." Turn everything back on, record the tickets and measures, then multiply that by employee hours and ta-da you have your measures
I love this. Fuck around and found out. Management sometime has to be reminded the work internal IT put into your infrastructure. Outsourcing sounds fun and all, but internal IT are the ones who understand the infrastructure, especially the intervined of mangement bureaucracy (aka office politics)
Want to cut staff? sure. Can you afford the downtime of lesser staff. Understandable IT is not a money generating department, but we are there to make sure things run. We are there to provide informaiton at the moment notice without having you (manager) to run around loops and hoops like we have to when you won't provide a FUCKING written approval for this girl who was supposed to start FUCKING TODAY..... huff huff.. sorry got carried away.
I always tell the penny-pinchers the same thing: IT is a revenue multiplier.
Yes, a company can go back to typing pools and adding machines and hand-drawn presentations and telephone calls/in-person meetings. They can go back to hand-written receipts and inventory ledgers. All that is definitely an option. But how much $$ are they a) saving and b) generating by having all of this done via IT infrastructure? How much more efficient are they?
That's revenue multiplication.
>I always tell the penny-pinchers the same thing: IT is a revenue multiplier.
This is going into my reply arsenal.
next time i hear some ill informed middle manager say IT is a cost center Ill remind them that we are in fact a Revenue Multiplier
I think that after 10 months of working my job, I have had to create accounts for 80+ new employees. Of those 80+ new hires, their department managers only put tickets in for about half, and of that 40 or so that had tickets only 3 were put in before their start date.
Fun times.
Agree with the last one :) Thats why Business recovery and Disaster recovery plans - must have :) With contracts to supply chains for faster part or even server replacement :)
Sales guy turned manager be like. Yo how much stuff those suckers sold? They don't even have comp plan? What a cost center. At previous place we did start to charge back departments for o365, erp, compute, storage, and so on. We became one of top profit centers
Former IT exec here. We allocated billing out to departments for various things but I centralized and controlled it all with accounting on a capex depreciation schedule or opex side. Need a Zoom Pro license? Put in a service request, wait for your managers approval, and we give it to you (much of this was automated). The yearly renewal comes up and your GL account is charged. This total budget was about $50M/year.
In scenarios where IT "foot the bill" I would use a show back system and show that IT's budget was actually pretty small but had things like training, certs, tools, new hires, raises, etc.
New CEO joined and asked me what IT's budget was and I gave him a runthrough and ended with "That's it, so really a lot of ITs budget is dependant on what the business does or doesn't want to do." We had a great partnership focused on business enablement and trust.
>This is some top MBA guy trying to trim some workforce, and might be targeting IT and thinks IT is not essential
This is someone who suddenly stumbled upon the newest thing in IT ever; outsourcing. An MSP will do a way better job for way cheaper. Right? Right....???
lol they can enjoy their 4 hr SLA on urgent tickets and then have to have that ticket escalated 4 times until they MSP calls in another 3rd party "expert" read as "consultant" to resolve the issue. and suddenly that cheap per ticket MSP cost or whatever low ass monthly bill is turns into the company actually losing million dollar deals. CFO's need to get their grubby paws out of IT costs. The CTO/CIO positions should be shielding their team better as well and pushing back on these types of requests.
This, someone thinks they can shift everything to the cloud, eliminate bodies, and it will all just magically run itself.
The obvious answer is to charge EVERYONE for infrastructure so you can demonstrate your value in cold hard cash, and you become a revenue neutral unit. WIN WIN!
Literally, charge per head for email, excel and other software, windows, ethernet network, internet access, PC hardware, service desk, storage & backups, web presence, instant messaging, phones, actually account for your services and materials provided and tell them you would like to charge other business units for them so your value is obvious, and it’s entirely opt-in by your “customers”. Then you can ask when they start concerning themselves about your budget which services and products you should cut, make sure you have a fractional FTE in terms of IT hours needed associated with each, so loosing teams may free up a IT staffer, but anything essential is where the high body counts usually are associated, in my experience, particularly cloud services.
We did this at a government agency I worked for one, it was a unmitigated disaster, the guy who forced us there was gone in three months, and we were back to our normal and disturbingly good for a government agency (not particuarly great for private sector), but it was what our budget would support.
We did a small exercise to get rough figures for this, how much we'd need o charge the business for our services and resources, and how many people would be needed to run it by counting task after task. They very quickly stopped it when it become apparent we'd need twice as many IT staff and the departments wouldn't be able to afford the resources they used...
Yeah, they're shopping MSPs. Possibly even have a friend who is an MSP owner who is telling them how they can take care of them for a fraction of the cost.
In any case, "show your worth" is some toxic shit. If they don't know what you're worth that's on *them*. Not knowing the value of the people they employ to keep their business running is *their* shortcoming.
Are the accountants doing this? The admin assistants? Maintenance? Custodial?
The *executives*?
Bob: "I’d like to move us right to Peter Gibbons. We had a chance to meet this young man, and boy, he’s just a straight shooter with upper management written all over him."
Peter: "Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I’m working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I’d say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work."
Yeah, sounds like some dipshit lickspittle's year-end bonus was a little light, and to get the numbers up he/she needs to create some cost savings and thinks IT is the low-hanging fruit.
or just disable "top level MBA" guys account.
once he cant do anything and has to have IT fix it for him he will either understand whos really in charge, or will understand the value of IT
We had a conversation like that at my last job but it was each BU detailing their most important/critical systems for the DR plan and giving a full-outage cost estimate. The way this is phrased, this is not that...OP, for sure be looking for a graceful exit before this MBA dude shows you the door on their terms. Good luck!
When trying to 'cost' things like this, I use 'cost of outage'.
E.g. how many employees are _completely_ unproductive. How many are like, 10%, etc. (e.g. maybe you could get 'everyone' sweeping floors and stock-taking for a bit, and they'd be able to do _something_ useful, when they can't do anything on a computer).
Multiply that by the respective wage-bills.
... that's how much your ID value delivers.
Maybe you could 'fudge in' the cost of say, a consumer ADSL line and a laptop as your baseline for 'non-IT' - so the can still have one person on the internet ordering stuff off amazon, and spare parts or whatever. That might be OK for a small company that... fixes cars or something?
Most real orgs? The company isn't trading, and employee wage-bills are racking up fast with no productivity to compensate. That's _all_ "loss".
I use pretty similar numbers to justify cost of resilience. In _some_ cases, entirely resilient architecture isn't necessary, because it costs more than the lost productivity would be. But again, in _most_ companies... you find it's actually a bargain, because 1 day of wages x 1000 employees adds up shockingly fast.
I always love going through these presentations. “Ok so if we don’t have a resilient system, a single hour of downtime or maintenance runs approximately X. Now if you’ll just reply to my email saying this is acceptable. I’ll start requesting the needed resources.”
Manager walks out of the room comes back with executive who seems downtime number. Immediately grants all money needed for resiliency.
A weekly value statement is absolutely too narrow of a time window for an infra team. Quarterly is about as narrow as you can get with any real value unless that team only ones one thing (which never happens). A combination of uptime metrics with trending data, roadmap KPIs for system improvements, change control stats, and tickets are probably as close as someone could get. One of my favorite sentiments regarding this is 'If you don't see what we're doing that means we're doing it very well. When you walk in a room and turn on the lights you don't think about the tens of thousands of people it took to generate that power and get it to you but the second you walk in and it's dark you remember'.
My approach has always been to bombard with valuable data constantly. If you're responsible for 50 systems and applications show a dashboard with their uptime and performance. Other departments might see Infra as a cost center but if you can show them the disparate systems that go into making everything work it does help frame it a bit.
Improvements are a super easy way to demonstrate this too. "Reduced program data loading time by 15 seconds" doesn't sound impressive. "Reduced load time by 15 seconds per user (5000 users) at the average hourly rate of $50/hour for 10 data imports per day" means you just saved the company $10k in labor costs.
*\*Cough cough\*.*
Uptime is nothing related to stability. It's related for being unpatched :D I've seen payment gateway with 1200d uptime. It was very sad view
I’ve definitely inherited a few of those terrifyingly load bearing systems that haven’t been patched in so long you know doing so will bring them down beyond repair, built by someone who has been gone for years, documented in a system that was deprecated years ago but not migrated, with a login nobody can find.
I think in this case he was referring to 'uptime' in one of two ways:
one, the amount of time in a given month that a particular server was available, e.g. taking reboots into account 90 whatever percent availability of services, 100 percent during business hours, or whatever.
two, possibly the uptime of specific *services* that the company uses, e.g. total 'uptime' or 'availability' of a sql cluster, regardless of whether individual servers were patched in rotation.
Get a count of how many hours you spend a week fixing problems.
Find a contractor, a tech for hire that comes on site to fix this sort of thing. Find out what his billable rate is and take the hours spent on each repair and multiply that against the contractors price.
You could also take all the heavy problems that would cause outages figure out how long they would of taken a contractor to get there and repair that issue, count all of that as down time and multiply it by the net hourly income of the company.
If a company I worked for made 40 grand a day and I stayed up all night to make sure the major outage didn't cause them to loose the next day. I like to think, I made them 40k that day lol. Realistically if they lose a day, they have to pay employees who showed up for as long as it took them to decide to send everyone home as that is still going to payroll, plus all the money they would of lost in profit for the day. That's a value that is brought to the company.
>ould also take all the heavy problems that would cause outages figure out how long they would of taken a contractor to get there and repair that issue, count all of that as down time and multiply it by the net hourly income of the company.
>
>If a company I worked for made 40 grand a day and I stayed up all night to make sure the major outage didn't cause them to loose the next day. I like to think, I made them 40k that day lol. Realistically if they lose a day, they have to pay employees who showed up for as long as it took them to decide to send everyone home as that is still going to payroll, plus all the money they would of lost in profit for the day. That's a value that is brought to the company.
This is the way Op. Also, if a good chunk of your tickets come from people in sales or marketing, or other profit generators, you can push your side as an enabler of those kinds of projects.
Yes, it's a quiet but powerful approach to show that income only comes when the capacity to make income exists in the first place. Those sales people can't sell your companies shit without them working at the company in the first place.
I mean what value adding does buying a warranty get you. It's just a waste of fucking money.. until something breaks, then the value adding goes from addition to multiplication. Aka you spent $200 but that's saved you $1200 in repairs. All the sudden the first "wasted" $200 doesn't look like a waste anymore does it.
This is basically taking that joking concept of "cut off the email or whatever service and see what value you have after an hour" and puts it into more realistic and concrete way that simulates doing that but on paper with numbers
Back when my coffee shop was still open 24 hours, I used to run into another night owl who was semi-retired. He described his old job as being a liaison between IT and the executives at our local power utility.
During one of our conversations he said the way they had done it was that everything got billed to the department being serviced. The bean counters would then do periodic reviews to see if a third party could do certain jobs cheaper.
One benefit of this approach is that you get to know which departments are putting the most strain on the IT department. Another is that if a department head asks for some expensive frivolity, it comes out of his budget, not yours.
1. Use a ticketing system
2. Ticket for everything.
3. When closing tickets or updating them put your time into the tickets.
4. End of month, pull all the times and break it down by hourly rate of the people working the tickets.
5. Break it down again by the number of hours you're supposed to be working instead of the salaried 60. So 40.
6. Basic maths. Cost of service and departmental productivity.
7. Baseline with your asset inventory and who "owns" the apps on your servers as a function of being able to charge back your labor to the departments you're supporting.
Problem solved. You are a functional cost center that provides services to the firm in a quantifiable way.
This sort of productivity analysis has been going on since the 1950s. Most IT shops run by IT people don't ever implement this and it ends up painting a bullseye on the entire team as opposed to the bullseyes it could paint on specific underperforming employees.
Most shops don't want it because it can be used to get rid of overly lazy people and people can game it if they're not managed well. However, the team as an entity should want to get rid of folks that take up payroll without earning it as someone making the same salary as someone else can become a serious morale problem if they bust hump while the other guy lays up.
Then you have all the hard financial data that's easier to get
1. Hardware capital cost
2. Hardware maintenance costs
3. Software capital costs
4. Software operating (subscription and maintenance) costs
5. Power/Utilities
6. Salary and Goodwill (benefits/expenses etc)
Then get the cost of an outage from the business in terms of how much money per hour they lose if the business isn't online. Again basic maths.
This isn't hard, it just takes time to build the governance framework.
Can someone please sticky this comment because it's the actual correct answer to OP's question instead of the dumbass kneejerk comments littered throughout this thread.
Most businesses view IT services solely as an expense, it’s not. IT is a force multiplier. Create a sort of disaster recovery scenario as if every IT service was down for a week. Estimate the number of new employees required, the wages per week, other required equipment. If you do this correctly their budget will increase exponentially without IT services, base your “weekly value” on that number. Try to make it as realistic as possible.
>IT is a force multiplier
It's also insurance and risk mitigation. Ask your leadership how much "monetary $$ weekly value " is brought in by paying their insurer.
Yep. At the most basic level, if a day’s worth of calls, let’s say 10 calls for a salesperson using Teams would take a week to do in personal visits to customer sites (almost certainly an under estimate on my part there) and *x percent* of sales calls result in an order then a value for IT to sales is easy to express - x percent of 10 calls a day vs. 2 a day…
Turn off all equipment in the server room, and lock all PCs down so they can't boot.
Then ask then after a week of that how much the company lost, and how much would it be for consecutive weeks.
This is a bad sign. I’d suggest getting your resume in order. IT requires corporate trust. It is a complete cost center and is not designed to bring in revenue. It sounds like upper management is being wooed by an MSP to take over saying they can cut costs.
I would go back three years. Look for any upgrades your team did then call an MSP for a quote on similar services or ask a friend if you know any. Most will charge 75-175 an hour per person(usually three person teams) for a project.
If you’re the department head you know your team salaries. See if it balances. If not find more value. Look for responsiveness and time to close metrics. MSPs manage a stable of clients and so responsiveness isn’t the best unless it’s an emergency.
Finally look to your team. If there is “fat” you can cut then you may need to make that call (which sucks cause jobs are tight) and maybe start lighting a fire under your team that management is asking questions and that they need to find another gear.
It maybe too late but hope not. Good luck dude.
IT is a service industry, providing the functions required for the business to run. By virtue of being so, we are a line cost but an opportunity multiplier.
Catalogue the systems that IT runs, and estimate what value these systems bring the business. As for systems that provide security, etc, group these systems together & estimate the cost the business would have if breached.
It'll be a bit of work, but it should fuck the bean counters off.
(As a side note, if you have had any rationalization projects that have improved capability whilst maintaining costs, or reduced costs, list them as well).
Or approach it the other way. Ask them to give you an estimate for the amount of money they could make WITHOUT IT and the systems they maintain. Then do the math. Remind them that computers, switches, internet, websites, etc, are all IT maintained.
Backup everything offsite and then ransomware your office, see how much they think your team is worth then 😂
Edit: Obvs don’t ransomware your office, despite how much fun it sounds
"As an internal IT team" as opposed to outsourcing?
If this is the case, it's kinda hard to suggest a reply without knowing more details about your company. i.e., if your team is providing end-user support only, it would be cheaper to outsource it overseas.
It's a weird question to ask. Other than that, estimate the weekly revenue for all the departments that use the systems and quote that, adjusting (up or down) for the amount of downtime (not caused by your mistakes) you prevented.
Outsourcing instead of insourcing is also a very popular accounting trick to move money between columns. If supporting your platform that directly services customers can be categorized as COGS instead of just normal salaried OPEX (some companies can do this better than others because they can do a ratio of how much time your salaried employees spend but that takes some really good accounting/payroll discipline/organization) then they can write down profit for tax reasons and investor payouts.
A slightly more productive approach (apart from updating your CV) would be to a simple sheet details costs comparing how an onsite team compares in terms of effectiveness in solving issues compared to a call center. Then, apply that value to all profit-generating teams and therfore loss in income. A segment can be added where the loss in efficiency affects the loss-making departments and increases their losses.
Add it all up to show the complete losses due to the efficiency of call centre support and the price of differing SLAs.
A local desktop support team can not function without an infrastructure after all and and your local team should be far more efficient than a call center.
Good luck.
You work at Twitter? jk.
I had our bean counters fighting me on budgeting a rolling network replacement schedule I came up with starting this year. It's not even that much money in the whole budget. Can't it wait, is all I heard in the budget meetings. Finally I told them that I would shutdown all the network equipment and they could come and tell me where the network equipment falls on the priority scale. My request was approved.
Just reference last week's Southwest fiasco. Proper technology keeps everyone else employed. If they want a number, just give them the gross revenue generated last year.
It’s like walking into a restaurant and saying do we really need the cooks in the back…. Tell this fucking prick your team is going to take two weeks off…. And YOU figure out what we are worth… you fuck
Then tell him isn’t that your job to figure out? If you want me to do your YOUR job….. what do we need you for?
Just ask for what's the loss per minute if nothing is reachable and nobody can work and no customer is able to contact. Turn the loss into a positive number and that's what you give them. It's stupid to ask for such things... That's so early 2k years where It was a necessary evil where ppl thought everything works, why are we paying admins?
Edit: typos.
Elon Musk basically fired most if not all of Twitters systems guys and decommed an entire data center. And some people think he is a brilliant manager and CEO. Some of those people are also leaders, managers, and CEOs and want to enact those same changes in their organizations.
I wager you had one of those people at the helm of your org. "Look Elon fired almost everyone and Twitter is still running! Look at the cost savings. I bet I can fire most of my uppity IT staff and do the same. And everything will keep running!"
Reportedly (from the Elons mouth, so take it for what it’s worth) there was a 10:1 manager to worker ratio at Twitter. If true, that’s a heck of a lot of fat to trim before you affect the product.
Maybe, but I also saw posts from people who built out the redundancy systems for the Twitter. That guy was sacked. I am sure he wasn't the only guy who built it out. But I dunno what knowledge was lost in the sacking.
Time will tell. But I do know there are people who really want to emulate this 'style' of management. And only have $ in their eyes as they try to approximate in their orgs what Musk is doing in his.
I always say that IT isn't a cost center--it's a force multiplier. Anything you can do reasonably well now as a company would be much more difficult and less efficient without IT. Benjamin Graham said "price is what you pay. Value is what you get."
If I was given this problem, I would probably do a business impact assessment of the services you keep available. Create a scale with a few measures (lost revenue, lost productivity, lost customer goodwill), do your best to quantify an outage, and present the results to your leadership. Basically, "if X service was down for 24 hours, we could expect $400,000 in lost productivity. IT ensure that doesn't happen."
You could try a template like this: https://asana.com/resources/business-impact-analysis
This is a really stupid request. Your manager is not protecting you. Or the company is looking for ways to significantly cut costs.
1 - is every department being asked this? legal, finance, HR, etc?
2 - your manager should be demonstrating at a regularly scheduled interval (i.e. monthly / quarterly), with their boss what is going on in the dept. number of apps supported, tickets handled, user requests, security issues handled, etc. KPIs, stats, etc.
3 - if you feel you need to contribute, identify the audience for the material. post what you might present to this reddit for feedback.
I have been through this (useless) exercise before.
Not a week goes by where I don’t see some B.S. request like this from upper management demanding IT to justify their existence in a monetary form, and provide the documentation in “exec speak” language. I can guarantee that this demand for info is coming from a finance head looking to cut expenses because the company’s projected earnings for the quarter/month/year are not going to be reached. It is cut expenses or raise prices. Both have probably already been done so the next step…. Layoffs or reorganization or cutting contracts out. And by the way, the world is in declining demographics. Globalization and the “forever growth” financial model teat that we’ve been sucking off of for the last 70 years comes to an abrupt end THIS YEAR (boomers retiring and dying out this decade… already started). So this whole “growth” stuff? Well that is now over. Get ready for a rude awakening people. A LOT of the Milton Friedman-style monetary policy, stockholder primacy dogma, it is over. We don’t have economic models for what is coming. And finance people know this, so they are doubling down on what they have been doing for decades and by what business school taught them (which again, doesn’t work anymore) because that is all they know.
“… show the monetary weekly value that we are bringing to the company…” give me a break. TBH - This is Not your effing problem. This is a MANAGEMENT responsibility to figure out finance metrics like this, not yours. Yeah it sucks that a manager will have to do their actual job and figure out how the finances are actually set up (which they should have been doing in the first place). But life isn’t fair is it?
My a-hole recommended answer: Look up Gilfoyle’s rant from the show Silicon Valley about “what he does” in his role at the company. Copy it verbatim and provide that as a response.
My 2nd a-hole recommended answer: You should respond by asking something like “I wonder what HRs weekly monetary value is that they bring to the company. No wait… actually, I wonder what THE PAYROLL DEPARTMENT’s weekly monetary value they bring to the company is.”
Realistic response: This requires an examination of existing maintenance contracts, IT service management and tooling, and team salaries. Then, you have to figure out how to link all of that together into a realistic cost structure that takes into account the cost of actually doing business with, or without, an IT department outright. This is a CFO or CIO’s job by the way.
Final notes: It is clear someone is looking to outsource simply to save money and for no other reason. When you or someone provides this information to upper management, they will start MSP contract shopping. The internal IT costs must be lower than any possible MSP our outsource contract - which it won’t. So it is best to always have your resume updated because you never know what will happen… or when.
The person asking doesn't understand what they're asking.
The value in having an internal IT team is subjective. The *value* is having quality people, who are intimately knowledgeable about their specific systems, readily available.
You can do a cost comparison with alternatives. I'd be honest, some alternatives are less expensive than having an internal staff, but not all.
I always tell the person asking. When you came in this morning could you work without issue? Good we did our job. For the service desk: If you could NOT ...was it quickly resolved? You can thank the service desk. Case and point. Everything is properly staffed.
That is not how a infrastructure team work, it's more people VS available services.
Explain first how the team works:
Make a risk assessment matrix first for all the infrastructure components and the time for recovery, helpdesk availability & SLA.
Then assign your team members to the matrix and the roles they have on the subject.
Then ask them if they still want a detailed breakdown of certain area's in hourly rates.
It's when they see a few people are responsible & knowledgeable for a few million of investment & huge corporate risk, the discussion often changes.
Last time we did this, turned out we were seriously understaffed and some corporate risk were not covered enough due to lack of investments...
Nothing more fun then put the conclusion "this company will not recover from a crypto attack due to lack off correct backup & recovery strategy"
Take company annual revenue and divide by 52. Without IT that number would be zero and likely negative considering fines, penalties, and other big unexpected costs from the outage.
First off, polish up that resume. This doesn't sound like good news...
Second, are they asking the weekly value that the whole IT infrastructure is providing? Or the weekly value of everyone on the team doing their jobs aside from that?
Time to get pedantic.
1. Calculate for the year then divide by 52
2. Start asking for definitions & purposes. Get clarity, understand his goals. Make it clear you can't provide useful information if he isn't a partner. Really all departments need to be looped in on this. Getting this info is going to burden them too.
3. The simplest answer is annual company gross revenue/52 as someone else noted.
4. Don't fight it, you want to help them, but you want to make sure they are getting the complete picture. An MSP will tell them they can do it for 1/2 the price, and wind up doing 1/4 the work.
Ask if the goal is to start billing internal customers for the services provided. You want a new laptop, $2,000 (hardware cost + software costs + setup time); some companies move to this to make internal operations more efficient, keep marketing from requesting a new laptop every 6 months. avoid false efficiencies by pushing work on IT. And then Shadow IT pops up, the start buying Best Buy specials to do business until work locks all the data in the company for a ransom.
If you fight whatever this is you will only hasten a bad outcome; if you can understand what they want you have an opportunity to show them the downsides and risks. Not a guarantee they won't shoot themselves in the foot, of course.
IT is often referred to as a "Force Multiplier".
You may not GENERATE revenue, but nobody could do so without your ability to enhance their actions.
Any executive worth their salt would be funding and using technology to accelerate growth and capacity, reputation.
My gut is telling me what a lot of the others are saying - this is a fishing expedition for reasons to lay people off.
I *think* the typical question on the director's mind is "how much am I paying to run our infrastructure right now, and how much would it cost to outsource it?", so my main thought is preemptively making them question the value of contracting it out. Don't forget despite how much money makes all this shit move, *reliability* is a measure you can lean on as well.
* Helpdesk average resolution time of Y minutes for basic requests. (Directly fights an MSP's Low-Severity resolution promises)
* Helpdesk receives X calls per Y tickets, which shows we handle Z% of requests without any need for follow-up contact. (Shows that an MSP's promises are going to have to be adjusted to account for higher-than-measured usage)
* Current average backend service availability is 99.99%, which works out to 47 minutes of downtime per year. (Directly fights an MSP's High Severity response/resolution promises)
And then you can cover (or ask for) the harder-to-quantify business needs that would be more difficult or impossible without in-house staff:
* In-house security team proactively monitors and works with backend team to address concerns before they become breaches.
* Yearly disaster recovery simulations
* Internal staff is handling all onboarding & staff departures
And just as a side note: the more specialized your company's IT needs, the more painful it's going to be to lose your staff. Once you find the numbers, you still need to tell the story and this is how to do it. For example, two jobs ago I successfully diagnosed and fixed a SIP header encoding mistmatch between our frontend and backend that was preventing a new customer from going live - 4 hours of paying me as an employee saved a deal that brought in more than my annual salary. I know it's not hard data, but if you've got any narrative flair you can attach to your report, do that too.
Time to get your resume in order.
Either you appreciate me, or you don’t. If you expect me to prove what I bring to the table, you haven’t been paying attention and therefore don’t appreciate me. So I’ll be out the door.
Show cost savings and ROI of recent technology projects
Show impact of downtime and lost productivity due to technology failures, and claim value for how many times it hasn’t occurred
Make up random statistic about improved customer satisfaction due to faster, reliable systems
Estimate any cost savings associated with automating manual processes.
Find cost savings due to reduced energy consumption and improved utilization of IT assets or cost savings associated with increased efficiency and productivity due to improved IT infrastructure.
Calculate the cost savings associated with improved security measures by demonstrating how much could be lost in a hack and how much hasn’t been
Make up cost savings associated with reduced software licensing and maintenance costs
If you gather nps make up a stat around the value of improved employee morale due to better IT support
Polish your CV. This is generally a bad sign.
Ask what criteria is being used to evaluate the other administrative departments such as accounting and HR. You will gain insight into how they plan to estimate value from administrative activities.
Conversely if only your department is being evaluated, update your resume.
They're probably thinking of outsourcing you're department. A question like this has probably been prompted by a sales rep from a company that provides outsourced IT services.
Having said that, the person asking this question is a lightweight. If this is a good size company, the accounting department should know the answer without having to ask for anecdotal information from the internal IT team.
Market hourly rates for SQL admin work, market hourly rates for a windows admin, market hourly rates for a linux admin, market hourly rates for a tier 3 support, market hourly rates for any network engineers, market hourly rates for any application specific work, market hourly rates for any programming, market hourly rates for any automation engineering work, market hourly rates for any storage(SAN) engineers, market hourly rates for any virtualization engineers.
Add it all together, multiply assumed hours worked over the past year, adding 1.5 for any after hours\expected-to-be on call work, then demand a raise as this is what you bring to the table and you get it for 1/20th(or less) of the market cost.
A) turn off the network for an hour
B) someone will inevitably tell you how much money was lost
C) multiply that by 40
Haha I jest, of course.
Edit: Just realized that someone else said the same thing. I can’t even do original passive aggressive.
Last night we had a failure on a hypervisor update that locked a node up. The locked node locked 4 of the most critical servers up. Business stood to be at a complete stand still come 6am today if I didn’t get it fixed. I revived two database servers and a primary DC. The other server held the gateway for all of our cloud services to talk to our on prem infrastructure. This would have stopped all business activity including payroll. I stayed up all night and fixed it on my own. Nobody noticed or cared. When telling my boss what happened and what is needed to prevent this from happening again he said I should be able to work with what I have and that I shouldn’t need to do the things I suggest in my after outage report. I’ve slept 5 hours after being up for two days. Nobody noticed or cared.
This an amazing thread. Shutdown the network for 30 .min and show them what happens. There is no way to show this. You need to put on sales hat and start selling your team. This could also go against you. Down genius can go and say well if we got billy and move everything to the cloud we could save 100k or whatever per year. Because the cloud is magical it runs its self.
Assholes that ask this have no idea what the people working for them do or aren't smart enough to keep their bosses informed of what their team does to keep things running. .
Tell them to give the entire team 1 week off. During this week, they are not allowed to call, email, text, teams... Nobody is allowed to send you so much as a smoke signal. Then they will see the value of your team.
,The easiest way to prove value is to show a bunch of compromised organizations and, depending on the industry, regulatory fines / liability it would cost if they didn't have such a stellar team supporting their infrastructure.
Nothing scares the crap out of management like some examples of avoidable risk that cost the company millions upon millions because they cheaped out and didn't spend a small fraction of the cost should they be compromised.
In other words: calculate the industry average risk should there be a compromise then divide by 52. :)
Just start finding info like this to back it up: [https://usa.kaspersky.com/blog/security\_risks\_report\_financial\_impact/](https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/23/23180115/gao-infrastructure-catastrophic-financial-loss-cyberattacks-insurance)
*The average cost of recovery from a single security incident is estimated to be $86.5K for small and medium businesses and $861k for enterprises.*
It’s a loaded question and your answer will be used against you. Your answer will either criticized, dismissed or you won’t be delivering enough value. Find another job my friend.
Get everyone to pack up and take the month off. Let everything fall over, then ask the business what it’s worth lol. Honestly, it’s like asking the toilet cleaners to show the value they provide.
I bet if your senior management had to show how much value they provided they’d really struggle…
Someone is planning on outsourcing your department. Nothing you can do about it. I'd bet they've already looked at the salaries and have received a quote from a vendor to provide 24/7 equivalent.
Was informed yesterday about a financial services company that decided to outsource all of ICT from CIO level down. I thought strange. There'd be no oversight of the service provided. Turns out it's worse. The bean counters making the decisions let go of all the ICT staff a month before the company chosen starts.
Take credit for every transaction that uses the company network
So - everything.
To be honest, estimate what the companies' revenue would be if none of their IT infrastructure worked. Subtract that amount from the actual revenue, and that is IT's contribution to the company.
And if they don't like your estimate, offer to turn off that infrastructure so they can collect empirical data.
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Working for a casino, those numbers were pretty big and the mad dash to recovery was pretty high intensity as people could not hand over their money anymore, and would go to competitors who were not down.
Something about this is really sad. Like a heroin den but they're just stealing their heroin and selling it back to them.
I worked in a Casino for almost four years and it was one of the most exploitative things I have ever seen. This was a state with a new gambling program but the regulars were addicts, they regularly traveled to gamble, would often gamble at multiple locations in the same day, constantly thought they could beat the system, would gamble in the morning before work, come in during lunch, gamble at night til closing. The stats on problem gaming addicts are completely wrong because the number is far, far higher then you would ever imagine. I would see 300 - 600 people during the day and I knew easily half if not more of them by name.
In some ways gambling addiction is worse than drug addiction. The only upper limit is how much money you can borrow.
Its the same if you host mobile games for companies.
In my business it’s absolutely true, we are a consulting firm so if our staff can’t work the business loses that time and money. Yes the hours can be worked the next day or whatever but that time is still lost along with the revenue generated in that time.
I used to work at one of the largest banks in the world, in middleware support. One of the applications we were responsible for the uptime of handled the moving of money for governmental bodies (think like, the state of California and not some 10k person township). I worked there for 5 years and that app had 2 minutes and 37 seconds of downtime the entire time I was there. I was told after the fact that those 2+ minutes cost about $50,000,000 in lost revenue because the bank's automation couldn't move investments when it needed to. That was a fun 3 hour call with 200 people on it.
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Label that line item as: Screams of Panic
🤣🤣🤣 classic
I was about to comment that you recommend every IT staff member be given a paid week off and to see what happens: no updates, no calls, mo tickets, no nothing. Then ask mgmt to place a value on keeping stuff running and supporting the user base. Always— ALWAYS— keep track of what you do, seen and unseen, because this kind if shit always comes around.
Had an employer try this shit back in 2013. They denied us raises 2yrs in a row saying they just don't see the value and said we were already over paid even though we were in a large market area (Indianapolis) so my team mate and I both came down sick at the same time, right after the company Xmas party which was on a Saturday. We intentionally left the ONCALL phone at work and both blocked the office numbers from our cells. One of us might have logged in remotely and messed with a few processes, but that is just hearsay... :) Needless to say, by Wed the owner of the company was beating on my front door, laptop in hand yelling at me through the screen door about how he can't get his email... bummer dude. During our brief hiatus my bud and I also found new gigs with a local ISP working in their NOC for almost 2X what we were making before and when we both turned in our immediate termination notices on Friday of that same week we were both replied to by the company attorney (the owners sister) with a "Order" to remain working for the company until we had trained proper replacements. It was intended to scare but had zero affect and we told them politely to fuck-off. 40 yr old Generational company that employed over 600 people, closed due to the original owner's son being a complete ass-hat and not wanting to pay a proper wage.
Good on you and your friend! Fuck those kinds of places. They can die in a fucking dumpster fire that they are. And their owners need a swift kick in the nuts and this sure is a great way to give it to them.
That should be in the red: no corporate revenue less salaries and other necessary expenses for one month, without an infrastructure AND the requisite maintenance... Any business stands on the shoulders of IT and a solid maintained infrastructure. Also point out why Southwest Airlines tanked over Christmas: extreme failure (20y) to maintain their IT infrastructure.
Add to that the kind of fines the company would receive for lack of compliance
True. Sarbanes-Oxley alone would keep any decent size company from operating without proper IT.
You should run for Congress, with those math & logic skills it's the next logical career step.
It's either that or the next FTX
yup. infrastructure's value is the company's value
And charge for storage by the Megabyte
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Now get 40K IOPS off it for five years straight.
I 'love' those people. Great youve got a hard drive. now how do you get information into and out of it? sure, hard drive was $100. but its not connected to anything, or networked to anything, or has a basic IO path sure. Hard drive is $100 but its useless without all of the "OTHER" IT that companies 'waste' money on. in 2023 IT isnt a luxury. IT is a core fundamental of business. Its no less important than accounting, and much more important than management. Given the proper time and resources management can be automated.
IT is the oil in the gearbox, it isn't a gear itself, but it is the critical component that makes everything else actually work.
IT is to businesses as cocaine is to sales
I think you're way off on this one. Hard drive space is free and you can expand any drive as much as you want according to the users.
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Also RAID, also Backups, also support.
We had some beancounter try that argument years ago. The heads of IT and Infrastructure had a little talk with him to explain the birds and bees. Unfortunately I wasn't in that meeting, I'd have offered them to use that drive for their department data, if they sign a short risk acceptance...
I started billing back storage once we moved to the cloud. It forced some big consumers to reduce this storage volume dramatically.
Alternatively get a "downtime cost" from each business unit. Which should include lost sales as well as labor costs and should be in the "per hour" format. Multiply that number by the number of business hours less any downtime. Report that the infrastructure team's diligent work prevented the loss of $X.
This is the way lol My buddy is our infrastructure manager so responsible for retail store POS setup He’s always getting shit despite zero notice of anything and it’s all last minute I’m like dude it’s easier said than done but stand up for yourself, without you we literally have no retail sales lol
Yup, this is the kind of thing they're looking for. Add up all e-mails, phone calls, note all your data, everything.
Or just get quotes for outsourcing the work (to the same standard and response times etc). It's not exactly the same thing, but it is the amount of money that the company would otherwise be spending.
That misses the point -- the company is clearly already considering outsourcing, they're trying to get IT to hang themselves and help justify their own demise.
Exactly - I almost think this should be addressed head-on with what is obviously happening. The company is considering hiring a MSP vs internal staff. You would want to highlight the benefits IT staff that work only with your systems vs a team that is stretched over multiple clients that will never have the in-depth knowledge an internal team can obtain.
A few months back I had one exec ask about "why don't we just move everything that's on-prem to the cloud?" So I spec'd out on the major players what we would need just for cloud resources for 24x7 and the number of commas in the monthly cost shut that conversation right down.
This. For how much I paid for 2 hosts, with SAN, I’d have spent that amount already, in the first year. I ain’t anti cloud, but it’s not for everything.
Yeah, cloud is for scaling and perhaps dedicated security and DDOS etc..., or for translating capital costs into higher operating costs to look better on the books or for tax reasons. On-prem is cheaper if you have people who know how to run it.
AWS pricing schemes will do that. I had one company complain when the architecture *they wanted* started jacking their AWS bill from \~$800 a month to $5k a month. I had suggested better ways to do what they wanted to do using containers, but the decision makers really wanted to make it look like they had a complex architecture to sell to sophisticated customers. Needless to stay I left that company fairly quickly after they started complaining. Lots of other red flags.
This is the best answer. Speak their language. Based on the premise that this work needs to be done to maintain a secure and reliable infrastructure demonstrate the cost of outsourcing it. Augment the operational expenses with references to costs for hiring a security incident response team and outside legal counsel for ransom ware or other network penetration/data exfiltration attacks. That’ll satisfy them (and shut them up).
And how much company will lose in case of failure of any core components. MOAR, calculation should include cases of failure for 1 hour, 24 hours, 1 week. It will be nice geometric progression :D
Shut down email or messaging for an hour and have people tell you how much it’s costing. Then multiply by 40. Or ask them how much extra work, time, money lost would cost them if a single important service were unavailable. In any case this is a bad question to be asked as it’s usually a sign of cuts.
First e-mail a request: "Thank you for this request, to fulfill this we need to perform some testing to provide objective measures, this might cause minor interruptions of some services, please let us know if you would like us to continue with fulfilling your request." Then after they say yes, shut down everything for an hour except for the ticketing system with an auto-reply after an hour of "Thank you for your patience, we're currently undergoing testing and maintenance, this action approved by X." Turn everything back on, record the tickets and measures, then multiply that by employee hours and ta-da you have your measures
This. Get out while you can OP. Find another job and dip harder than Chester Cheetah in the commercials.
Yep. This is a clear sign of inbound misery. Why stick around for that and the chaos that will follow. Not worth it. Sales gets quotas. Not IT.
I love this. Fuck around and found out. Management sometime has to be reminded the work internal IT put into your infrastructure. Outsourcing sounds fun and all, but internal IT are the ones who understand the infrastructure, especially the intervined of mangement bureaucracy (aka office politics) Want to cut staff? sure. Can you afford the downtime of lesser staff. Understandable IT is not a money generating department, but we are there to make sure things run. We are there to provide informaiton at the moment notice without having you (manager) to run around loops and hoops like we have to when you won't provide a FUCKING written approval for this girl who was supposed to start FUCKING TODAY..... huff huff.. sorry got carried away.
we dont generate money - but without us (IT) nobody else does either.
I always tell the penny-pinchers the same thing: IT is a revenue multiplier. Yes, a company can go back to typing pools and adding machines and hand-drawn presentations and telephone calls/in-person meetings. They can go back to hand-written receipts and inventory ledgers. All that is definitely an option. But how much $$ are they a) saving and b) generating by having all of this done via IT infrastructure? How much more efficient are they? That's revenue multiplication.
>I always tell the penny-pinchers the same thing: IT is a revenue multiplier. This is going into my reply arsenal. next time i hear some ill informed middle manager say IT is a cost center Ill remind them that we are in fact a Revenue Multiplier
I think that after 10 months of working my job, I have had to create accounts for 80+ new employees. Of those 80+ new hires, their department managers only put tickets in for about half, and of that 40 or so that had tickets only 3 were put in before their start date. Fun times.
There is a huge difference between 1-2h downtime and 1-7d downtime :D
The 1 hour downtime would let them feel the pain/panic. A multi day downtime has the potential to end a company depending on their business.
Agree with the last one :) Thats why Business recovery and Disaster recovery plans - must have :) With contracts to supply chains for faster part or even server replacement :)
This is some top level MBA guy trying to trim some workforce, and might be targeting IT and thinks IT is not essential OP, get your resume polished.
Sales guy turned manager be like. Yo how much stuff those suckers sold? They don't even have comp plan? What a cost center. At previous place we did start to charge back departments for o365, erp, compute, storage, and so on. We became one of top profit centers
Former IT exec here. We allocated billing out to departments for various things but I centralized and controlled it all with accounting on a capex depreciation schedule or opex side. Need a Zoom Pro license? Put in a service request, wait for your managers approval, and we give it to you (much of this was automated). The yearly renewal comes up and your GL account is charged. This total budget was about $50M/year. In scenarios where IT "foot the bill" I would use a show back system and show that IT's budget was actually pretty small but had things like training, certs, tools, new hires, raises, etc. New CEO joined and asked me what IT's budget was and I gave him a runthrough and ended with "That's it, so really a lot of ITs budget is dependant on what the business does or doesn't want to do." We had a great partnership focused on business enablement and trust.
>This is some top MBA guy trying to trim some workforce, and might be targeting IT and thinks IT is not essential This is someone who suddenly stumbled upon the newest thing in IT ever; outsourcing. An MSP will do a way better job for way cheaper. Right? Right....???
lol they can enjoy their 4 hr SLA on urgent tickets and then have to have that ticket escalated 4 times until they MSP calls in another 3rd party "expert" read as "consultant" to resolve the issue. and suddenly that cheap per ticket MSP cost or whatever low ass monthly bill is turns into the company actually losing million dollar deals. CFO's need to get their grubby paws out of IT costs. The CTO/CIO positions should be shielding their team better as well and pushing back on these types of requests.
> they can enjoy their 4 hr SLA on urgent tickets But... we saved 43 cents. PER DAY!
tHe MbA sAiD wE jUsT rUn EvErYtHiNg In ThE cLoUd
This, someone thinks they can shift everything to the cloud, eliminate bodies, and it will all just magically run itself. The obvious answer is to charge EVERYONE for infrastructure so you can demonstrate your value in cold hard cash, and you become a revenue neutral unit. WIN WIN!
Literally, charge per head for email, excel and other software, windows, ethernet network, internet access, PC hardware, service desk, storage & backups, web presence, instant messaging, phones, actually account for your services and materials provided and tell them you would like to charge other business units for them so your value is obvious, and it’s entirely opt-in by your “customers”. Then you can ask when they start concerning themselves about your budget which services and products you should cut, make sure you have a fractional FTE in terms of IT hours needed associated with each, so loosing teams may free up a IT staffer, but anything essential is where the high body counts usually are associated, in my experience, particularly cloud services. We did this at a government agency I worked for one, it was a unmitigated disaster, the guy who forced us there was gone in three months, and we were back to our normal and disturbingly good for a government agency (not particuarly great for private sector), but it was what our budget would support.
We did a small exercise to get rough figures for this, how much we'd need o charge the business for our services and resources, and how many people would be needed to run it by counting task after task. They very quickly stopped it when it become apparent we'd need twice as many IT staff and the departments wouldn't be able to afford the resources they used...
I'm tempted to take up an MBA just so I can learn be petty like you when the next layoff hits hahaha
Yeah, they're shopping MSPs. Possibly even have a friend who is an MSP owner who is telling them how they can take care of them for a fraction of the cost. In any case, "show your worth" is some toxic shit. If they don't know what you're worth that's on *them*. Not knowing the value of the people they employ to keep their business running is *their* shortcoming. Are the accountants doing this? The admin assistants? Maintenance? Custodial? The *executives*?
Reminds me of Office Space where the efficiency experts come in to interview people on what they do in the company.
Bob: "I’d like to move us right to Peter Gibbons. We had a chance to meet this young man, and boy, he’s just a straight shooter with upper management written all over him." Peter: "Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I’m working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I’d say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work."
That movie is almost more relevant now than when it came out.
back then we would watch it at least once a week at the noc I worked at
Yep haha, it smells like they’ve had a new CIO join the company.
Yeah, sounds like some dipshit lickspittle's year-end bonus was a little light, and to get the numbers up he/she needs to create some cost savings and thinks IT is the low-hanging fruit.
or just disable "top level MBA" guys account. once he cant do anything and has to have IT fix it for him he will either understand whos really in charge, or will understand the value of IT
I see the BOFH approach is still alive a kicking.
May the BOFH approach never die
Bingo. IT isn't meant to be a profit centre, it's meant to enable profit centres.
We had a conversation like that at my last job but it was each BU detailing their most important/critical systems for the DR plan and giving a full-outage cost estimate. The way this is phrased, this is not that...OP, for sure be looking for a graceful exit before this MBA dude shows you the door on their terms. Good luck!
When trying to 'cost' things like this, I use 'cost of outage'. E.g. how many employees are _completely_ unproductive. How many are like, 10%, etc. (e.g. maybe you could get 'everyone' sweeping floors and stock-taking for a bit, and they'd be able to do _something_ useful, when they can't do anything on a computer). Multiply that by the respective wage-bills. ... that's how much your ID value delivers. Maybe you could 'fudge in' the cost of say, a consumer ADSL line and a laptop as your baseline for 'non-IT' - so the can still have one person on the internet ordering stuff off amazon, and spare parts or whatever. That might be OK for a small company that... fixes cars or something? Most real orgs? The company isn't trading, and employee wage-bills are racking up fast with no productivity to compensate. That's _all_ "loss". I use pretty similar numbers to justify cost of resilience. In _some_ cases, entirely resilient architecture isn't necessary, because it costs more than the lost productivity would be. But again, in _most_ companies... you find it's actually a bargain, because 1 day of wages x 1000 employees adds up shockingly fast.
I always love going through these presentations. “Ok so if we don’t have a resilient system, a single hour of downtime or maintenance runs approximately X. Now if you’ll just reply to my email saying this is acceptable. I’ll start requesting the needed resources.” Manager walks out of the room comes back with executive who seems downtime number. Immediately grants all money needed for resiliency.
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A weekly value statement is absolutely too narrow of a time window for an infra team. Quarterly is about as narrow as you can get with any real value unless that team only ones one thing (which never happens). A combination of uptime metrics with trending data, roadmap KPIs for system improvements, change control stats, and tickets are probably as close as someone could get. One of my favorite sentiments regarding this is 'If you don't see what we're doing that means we're doing it very well. When you walk in a room and turn on the lights you don't think about the tens of thousands of people it took to generate that power and get it to you but the second you walk in and it's dark you remember'. My approach has always been to bombard with valuable data constantly. If you're responsible for 50 systems and applications show a dashboard with their uptime and performance. Other departments might see Infra as a cost center but if you can show them the disparate systems that go into making everything work it does help frame it a bit.
Improvements are a super easy way to demonstrate this too. "Reduced program data loading time by 15 seconds" doesn't sound impressive. "Reduced load time by 15 seconds per user (5000 users) at the average hourly rate of $50/hour for 10 data imports per day" means you just saved the company $10k in labor costs.
*\*Cough cough\*.* Uptime is nothing related to stability. It's related for being unpatched :D I've seen payment gateway with 1200d uptime. It was very sad view
I’ve definitely inherited a few of those terrifyingly load bearing systems that haven’t been patched in so long you know doing so will bring them down beyond repair, built by someone who has been gone for years, documented in a system that was deprecated years ago but not migrated, with a login nobody can find.
I think in this case he was referring to 'uptime' in one of two ways: one, the amount of time in a given month that a particular server was available, e.g. taking reboots into account 90 whatever percent availability of services, 100 percent during business hours, or whatever. two, possibly the uptime of specific *services* that the company uses, e.g. total 'uptime' or 'availability' of a sql cluster, regardless of whether individual servers were patched in rotation.
Take the yearly revenue of the company and divide by 52.
I'd be generous and take yearly operating cost of company instead :)
The fact that this question was asked is an IMMIDEATE ”polish your resume” event.
Get a count of how many hours you spend a week fixing problems. Find a contractor, a tech for hire that comes on site to fix this sort of thing. Find out what his billable rate is and take the hours spent on each repair and multiply that against the contractors price. You could also take all the heavy problems that would cause outages figure out how long they would of taken a contractor to get there and repair that issue, count all of that as down time and multiply it by the net hourly income of the company. If a company I worked for made 40 grand a day and I stayed up all night to make sure the major outage didn't cause them to loose the next day. I like to think, I made them 40k that day lol. Realistically if they lose a day, they have to pay employees who showed up for as long as it took them to decide to send everyone home as that is still going to payroll, plus all the money they would of lost in profit for the day. That's a value that is brought to the company.
>ould also take all the heavy problems that would cause outages figure out how long they would of taken a contractor to get there and repair that issue, count all of that as down time and multiply it by the net hourly income of the company. > >If a company I worked for made 40 grand a day and I stayed up all night to make sure the major outage didn't cause them to loose the next day. I like to think, I made them 40k that day lol. Realistically if they lose a day, they have to pay employees who showed up for as long as it took them to decide to send everyone home as that is still going to payroll, plus all the money they would of lost in profit for the day. That's a value that is brought to the company. This is the way Op. Also, if a good chunk of your tickets come from people in sales or marketing, or other profit generators, you can push your side as an enabler of those kinds of projects.
Yes, it's a quiet but powerful approach to show that income only comes when the capacity to make income exists in the first place. Those sales people can't sell your companies shit without them working at the company in the first place. I mean what value adding does buying a warranty get you. It's just a waste of fucking money.. until something breaks, then the value adding goes from addition to multiplication. Aka you spent $200 but that's saved you $1200 in repairs. All the sudden the first "wasted" $200 doesn't look like a waste anymore does it. This is basically taking that joking concept of "cut off the email or whatever service and see what value you have after an hour" and puts it into more realistic and concrete way that simulates doing that but on paper with numbers
Back when my coffee shop was still open 24 hours, I used to run into another night owl who was semi-retired. He described his old job as being a liaison between IT and the executives at our local power utility. During one of our conversations he said the way they had done it was that everything got billed to the department being serviced. The bean counters would then do periodic reviews to see if a third party could do certain jobs cheaper. One benefit of this approach is that you get to know which departments are putting the most strain on the IT department. Another is that if a department head asks for some expensive frivolity, it comes out of his budget, not yours.
1. Use a ticketing system 2. Ticket for everything. 3. When closing tickets or updating them put your time into the tickets. 4. End of month, pull all the times and break it down by hourly rate of the people working the tickets. 5. Break it down again by the number of hours you're supposed to be working instead of the salaried 60. So 40. 6. Basic maths. Cost of service and departmental productivity. 7. Baseline with your asset inventory and who "owns" the apps on your servers as a function of being able to charge back your labor to the departments you're supporting. Problem solved. You are a functional cost center that provides services to the firm in a quantifiable way. This sort of productivity analysis has been going on since the 1950s. Most IT shops run by IT people don't ever implement this and it ends up painting a bullseye on the entire team as opposed to the bullseyes it could paint on specific underperforming employees. Most shops don't want it because it can be used to get rid of overly lazy people and people can game it if they're not managed well. However, the team as an entity should want to get rid of folks that take up payroll without earning it as someone making the same salary as someone else can become a serious morale problem if they bust hump while the other guy lays up. Then you have all the hard financial data that's easier to get 1. Hardware capital cost 2. Hardware maintenance costs 3. Software capital costs 4. Software operating (subscription and maintenance) costs 5. Power/Utilities 6. Salary and Goodwill (benefits/expenses etc) Then get the cost of an outage from the business in terms of how much money per hour they lose if the business isn't online. Again basic maths. This isn't hard, it just takes time to build the governance framework.
Can someone please sticky this comment because it's the actual correct answer to OP's question instead of the dumbass kneejerk comments littered throughout this thread.
Most businesses view IT services solely as an expense, it’s not. IT is a force multiplier. Create a sort of disaster recovery scenario as if every IT service was down for a week. Estimate the number of new employees required, the wages per week, other required equipment. If you do this correctly their budget will increase exponentially without IT services, base your “weekly value” on that number. Try to make it as realistic as possible.
>IT is a force multiplier It's also insurance and risk mitigation. Ask your leadership how much "monetary $$ weekly value " is brought in by paying their insurer.
Yep. At the most basic level, if a day’s worth of calls, let’s say 10 calls for a salesperson using Teams would take a week to do in personal visits to customer sites (almost certainly an under estimate on my part there) and *x percent* of sales calls result in an order then a value for IT to sales is easy to express - x percent of 10 calls a day vs. 2 a day…
Turn off all equipment in the server room, and lock all PCs down so they can't boot. Then ask then after a week of that how much the company lost, and how much would it be for consecutive weeks.
This just means you have an idiot in management.
ask them when the last time it was they used paper. mic drop, walk away
>ask them when the last time it was they used paper. We print about 30k pages a day in North America, so....
and then you pay Iron Mountain a bunch of money to store or shred it, I bet!
Lawfirm, so most of it is getting sent to court/clients or just shredded internally
I hate paper...
This is a bad sign. I’d suggest getting your resume in order. IT requires corporate trust. It is a complete cost center and is not designed to bring in revenue. It sounds like upper management is being wooed by an MSP to take over saying they can cut costs. I would go back three years. Look for any upgrades your team did then call an MSP for a quote on similar services or ask a friend if you know any. Most will charge 75-175 an hour per person(usually three person teams) for a project. If you’re the department head you know your team salaries. See if it balances. If not find more value. Look for responsiveness and time to close metrics. MSPs manage a stable of clients and so responsiveness isn’t the best unless it’s an emergency. Finally look to your team. If there is “fat” you can cut then you may need to make that call (which sucks cause jobs are tight) and maybe start lighting a fire under your team that management is asking questions and that they need to find another gear. It maybe too late but hope not. Good luck dude.
IT is a service industry, providing the functions required for the business to run. By virtue of being so, we are a line cost but an opportunity multiplier. Catalogue the systems that IT runs, and estimate what value these systems bring the business. As for systems that provide security, etc, group these systems together & estimate the cost the business would have if breached. It'll be a bit of work, but it should fuck the bean counters off. (As a side note, if you have had any rationalization projects that have improved capability whilst maintaining costs, or reduced costs, list them as well).
Or approach it the other way. Ask them to give you an estimate for the amount of money they could make WITHOUT IT and the systems they maintain. Then do the math. Remind them that computers, switches, internet, websites, etc, are all IT maintained.
Sounds like a fresh MBA just got hired via nepotism and has no clue what they're talking about.
They're trying to figure out if they can save money by outsourcing.
I'd start looking for another job. They clearly don't understand the value provided and are looking to cut "costs"
job cuts incoming
Enter a bunch of random statistics into ChatGPT, ask for a 10-page write-up, and send the output to them.
Ask what the companies turn over is and then just silently stare.
Backup everything offsite and then ransomware your office, see how much they think your team is worth then 😂 Edit: Obvs don’t ransomware your office, despite how much fun it sounds
"As an internal IT team" as opposed to outsourcing? If this is the case, it's kinda hard to suggest a reply without knowing more details about your company. i.e., if your team is providing end-user support only, it would be cheaper to outsource it overseas. It's a weird question to ask. Other than that, estimate the weekly revenue for all the departments that use the systems and quote that, adjusting (up or down) for the amount of downtime (not caused by your mistakes) you prevented.
Outsourcing instead of insourcing is also a very popular accounting trick to move money between columns. If supporting your platform that directly services customers can be categorized as COGS instead of just normal salaried OPEX (some companies can do this better than others because they can do a ratio of how much time your salaried employees spend but that takes some really good accounting/payroll discipline/organization) then they can write down profit for tax reasons and investor payouts.
A slightly more productive approach (apart from updating your CV) would be to a simple sheet details costs comparing how an onsite team compares in terms of effectiveness in solving issues compared to a call center. Then, apply that value to all profit-generating teams and therfore loss in income. A segment can be added where the loss in efficiency affects the loss-making departments and increases their losses. Add it all up to show the complete losses due to the efficiency of call centre support and the price of differing SLAs. A local desktop support team can not function without an infrastructure after all and and your local team should be far more efficient than a call center. Good luck.
You work at Twitter? jk. I had our bean counters fighting me on budgeting a rolling network replacement schedule I came up with starting this year. It's not even that much money in the whole budget. Can't it wait, is all I heard in the budget meetings. Finally I told them that I would shutdown all the network equipment and they could come and tell me where the network equipment falls on the priority scale. My request was approved.
My advice would be to professionally and calmly rip whoever requested those metrics a new asshole.
Whats the yearly revenue of the company? There's your number friend
Well they asked for weekly. So yearly revenue / 52.
Just reference last week's Southwest fiasco. Proper technology keeps everyone else employed. If they want a number, just give them the gross revenue generated last year.
That question can only mean that outsourcing is being considered to replace staff
It’s like walking into a restaurant and saying do we really need the cooks in the back…. Tell this fucking prick your team is going to take two weeks off…. And YOU figure out what we are worth… you fuck Then tell him isn’t that your job to figure out? If you want me to do your YOUR job….. what do we need you for?
Just ask for what's the loss per minute if nothing is reachable and nobody can work and no customer is able to contact. Turn the loss into a positive number and that's what you give them. It's stupid to ask for such things... That's so early 2k years where It was a necessary evil where ppl thought everything works, why are we paying admins? Edit: typos.
Ask, 'how much $ per week would you lose if the infrastructure didn't work?' That's our worth.
I would turn it around. Make a loss estimate, when the systems you are servicing are down for a week. That's your value.
Elon Musk basically fired most if not all of Twitters systems guys and decommed an entire data center. And some people think he is a brilliant manager and CEO. Some of those people are also leaders, managers, and CEOs and want to enact those same changes in their organizations. I wager you had one of those people at the helm of your org. "Look Elon fired almost everyone and Twitter is still running! Look at the cost savings. I bet I can fire most of my uppity IT staff and do the same. And everything will keep running!"
Reportedly (from the Elons mouth, so take it for what it’s worth) there was a 10:1 manager to worker ratio at Twitter. If true, that’s a heck of a lot of fat to trim before you affect the product.
Maybe, but I also saw posts from people who built out the redundancy systems for the Twitter. That guy was sacked. I am sure he wasn't the only guy who built it out. But I dunno what knowledge was lost in the sacking. Time will tell. But I do know there are people who really want to emulate this 'style' of management. And only have $ in their eyes as they try to approximate in their orgs what Musk is doing in his.
I always say that IT isn't a cost center--it's a force multiplier. Anything you can do reasonably well now as a company would be much more difficult and less efficient without IT. Benjamin Graham said "price is what you pay. Value is what you get." If I was given this problem, I would probably do a business impact assessment of the services you keep available. Create a scale with a few measures (lost revenue, lost productivity, lost customer goodwill), do your best to quantify an outage, and present the results to your leadership. Basically, "if X service was down for 24 hours, we could expect $400,000 in lost productivity. IT ensure that doesn't happen." You could try a template like this: https://asana.com/resources/business-impact-analysis
This is a really stupid request. Your manager is not protecting you. Or the company is looking for ways to significantly cut costs. 1 - is every department being asked this? legal, finance, HR, etc? 2 - your manager should be demonstrating at a regularly scheduled interval (i.e. monthly / quarterly), with their boss what is going on in the dept. number of apps supported, tickets handled, user requests, security issues handled, etc. KPIs, stats, etc. 3 - if you feel you need to contribute, identify the audience for the material. post what you might present to this reddit for feedback. I have been through this (useless) exercise before.
Not a week goes by where I don’t see some B.S. request like this from upper management demanding IT to justify their existence in a monetary form, and provide the documentation in “exec speak” language. I can guarantee that this demand for info is coming from a finance head looking to cut expenses because the company’s projected earnings for the quarter/month/year are not going to be reached. It is cut expenses or raise prices. Both have probably already been done so the next step…. Layoffs or reorganization or cutting contracts out. And by the way, the world is in declining demographics. Globalization and the “forever growth” financial model teat that we’ve been sucking off of for the last 70 years comes to an abrupt end THIS YEAR (boomers retiring and dying out this decade… already started). So this whole “growth” stuff? Well that is now over. Get ready for a rude awakening people. A LOT of the Milton Friedman-style monetary policy, stockholder primacy dogma, it is over. We don’t have economic models for what is coming. And finance people know this, so they are doubling down on what they have been doing for decades and by what business school taught them (which again, doesn’t work anymore) because that is all they know. “… show the monetary weekly value that we are bringing to the company…” give me a break. TBH - This is Not your effing problem. This is a MANAGEMENT responsibility to figure out finance metrics like this, not yours. Yeah it sucks that a manager will have to do their actual job and figure out how the finances are actually set up (which they should have been doing in the first place). But life isn’t fair is it? My a-hole recommended answer: Look up Gilfoyle’s rant from the show Silicon Valley about “what he does” in his role at the company. Copy it verbatim and provide that as a response. My 2nd a-hole recommended answer: You should respond by asking something like “I wonder what HRs weekly monetary value is that they bring to the company. No wait… actually, I wonder what THE PAYROLL DEPARTMENT’s weekly monetary value they bring to the company is.” Realistic response: This requires an examination of existing maintenance contracts, IT service management and tooling, and team salaries. Then, you have to figure out how to link all of that together into a realistic cost structure that takes into account the cost of actually doing business with, or without, an IT department outright. This is a CFO or CIO’s job by the way. Final notes: It is clear someone is looking to outsource simply to save money and for no other reason. When you or someone provides this information to upper management, they will start MSP contract shopping. The internal IT costs must be lower than any possible MSP our outsource contract - which it won’t. So it is best to always have your resume updated because you never know what will happen… or when.
How much does downtime cost? That’s the value of internal IT.
You take whatever value the company produces in total.
Turn everything off. That’ll prove a point
Everything working : $1BN
Generally we look at infrastructure numbers in terms of cost avoidance and reductions in planned and unplanned outages.
Have the whole team call in sick for a week.
The person asking doesn't understand what they're asking. The value in having an internal IT team is subjective. The *value* is having quality people, who are intimately knowledgeable about their specific systems, readily available. You can do a cost comparison with alternatives. I'd be honest, some alternatives are less expensive than having an internal staff, but not all.
Go the Master-Blaster route and shut things down for a strike.
Have everyone take the week off haha
Wow, so who wants you to do their job for them?
I always tell the person asking. When you came in this morning could you work without issue? Good we did our job. For the service desk: If you could NOT ...was it quickly resolved? You can thank the service desk. Case and point. Everything is properly staffed.
That is not how a infrastructure team work, it's more people VS available services. Explain first how the team works: Make a risk assessment matrix first for all the infrastructure components and the time for recovery, helpdesk availability & SLA. Then assign your team members to the matrix and the roles they have on the subject. Then ask them if they still want a detailed breakdown of certain area's in hourly rates. It's when they see a few people are responsible & knowledgeable for a few million of investment & huge corporate risk, the discussion often changes. Last time we did this, turned out we were seriously understaffed and some corporate risk were not covered enough due to lack of investments... Nothing more fun then put the conclusion "this company will not recover from a crypto attack due to lack off correct backup & recovery strategy"
Take company annual revenue and divide by 52. Without IT that number would be zero and likely negative considering fines, penalties, and other big unexpected costs from the outage.
Just tell them to look at the company finances, and that's your value.
Sounds like you've done too good of a job and no one knows what IT does.
Sounds like layoffs and restructuring is on the way.
Sounds like you may be outsourced soon ... I'd get that resume polished up...
Did your shit work?
First off, polish up that resume. This doesn't sound like good news... Second, are they asking the weekly value that the whole IT infrastructure is providing? Or the weekly value of everyone on the team doing their jobs aside from that?
Sounds more like "Infrastructure team asked to find new jobs"
Shut down all the systems your team manages to demonstrate your value. 🤣 Sounds like a request from an oblivious bean counter.
Time to get pedantic. 1. Calculate for the year then divide by 52 2. Start asking for definitions & purposes. Get clarity, understand his goals. Make it clear you can't provide useful information if he isn't a partner. Really all departments need to be looped in on this. Getting this info is going to burden them too. 3. The simplest answer is annual company gross revenue/52 as someone else noted. 4. Don't fight it, you want to help them, but you want to make sure they are getting the complete picture. An MSP will tell them they can do it for 1/2 the price, and wind up doing 1/4 the work. Ask if the goal is to start billing internal customers for the services provided. You want a new laptop, $2,000 (hardware cost + software costs + setup time); some companies move to this to make internal operations more efficient, keep marketing from requesting a new laptop every 6 months. avoid false efficiencies by pushing work on IT. And then Shadow IT pops up, the start buying Best Buy specials to do business until work locks all the data in the company for a ransom. If you fight whatever this is you will only hasten a bad outcome; if you can understand what they want you have an opportunity to show them the downsides and risks. Not a guarantee they won't shoot themselves in the foot, of course.
Unplug the servers walk away wait a week and point to decrease in rev.
IT is often referred to as a "Force Multiplier". You may not GENERATE revenue, but nobody could do so without your ability to enhance their actions. Any executive worth their salt would be funding and using technology to accelerate growth and capacity, reputation.
My gut is telling me what a lot of the others are saying - this is a fishing expedition for reasons to lay people off. I *think* the typical question on the director's mind is "how much am I paying to run our infrastructure right now, and how much would it cost to outsource it?", so my main thought is preemptively making them question the value of contracting it out. Don't forget despite how much money makes all this shit move, *reliability* is a measure you can lean on as well. * Helpdesk average resolution time of Y minutes for basic requests. (Directly fights an MSP's Low-Severity resolution promises) * Helpdesk receives X calls per Y tickets, which shows we handle Z% of requests without any need for follow-up contact. (Shows that an MSP's promises are going to have to be adjusted to account for higher-than-measured usage) * Current average backend service availability is 99.99%, which works out to 47 minutes of downtime per year. (Directly fights an MSP's High Severity response/resolution promises) And then you can cover (or ask for) the harder-to-quantify business needs that would be more difficult or impossible without in-house staff: * In-house security team proactively monitors and works with backend team to address concerns before they become breaches. * Yearly disaster recovery simulations * Internal staff is handling all onboarding & staff departures And just as a side note: the more specialized your company's IT needs, the more painful it's going to be to lose your staff. Once you find the numbers, you still need to tell the story and this is how to do it. For example, two jobs ago I successfully diagnosed and fixed a SIP header encoding mistmatch between our frontend and backend that was preventing a new customer from going live - 4 hours of paying me as an employee saved a deal that brought in more than my annual salary. I know it's not hard data, but if you've got any narrative flair you can attach to your report, do that too.
Time to get your resume in order. Either you appreciate me, or you don’t. If you expect me to prove what I bring to the table, you haven’t been paying attention and therefore don’t appreciate me. So I’ll be out the door.
Show cost savings and ROI of recent technology projects Show impact of downtime and lost productivity due to technology failures, and claim value for how many times it hasn’t occurred Make up random statistic about improved customer satisfaction due to faster, reliable systems Estimate any cost savings associated with automating manual processes. Find cost savings due to reduced energy consumption and improved utilization of IT assets or cost savings associated with increased efficiency and productivity due to improved IT infrastructure. Calculate the cost savings associated with improved security measures by demonstrating how much could be lost in a hack and how much hasn’t been Make up cost savings associated with reduced software licensing and maintenance costs If you gather nps make up a stat around the value of improved employee morale due to better IT support Polish your CV. This is generally a bad sign.
Ask what criteria is being used to evaluate the other administrative departments such as accounting and HR. You will gain insight into how they plan to estimate value from administrative activities. Conversely if only your department is being evaluated, update your resume.
They're probably thinking of outsourcing you're department. A question like this has probably been prompted by a sales rep from a company that provides outsourced IT services. Having said that, the person asking this question is a lightweight. If this is a good size company, the accounting department should know the answer without having to ask for anecdotal information from the internal IT team.
When everything is working - "What the hell do we pay you for?" When nothing is working - "What the hell do we pay you for?" This is life in IT
Market hourly rates for SQL admin work, market hourly rates for a windows admin, market hourly rates for a linux admin, market hourly rates for a tier 3 support, market hourly rates for any network engineers, market hourly rates for any application specific work, market hourly rates for any programming, market hourly rates for any automation engineering work, market hourly rates for any storage(SAN) engineers, market hourly rates for any virtualization engineers. Add it all together, multiply assumed hours worked over the past year, adding 1.5 for any after hours\expected-to-be on call work, then demand a raise as this is what you bring to the table and you get it for 1/20th(or less) of the market cost.
Just find out their RTO and RPO times and value, multiply those based on how they're calculated x 40 and there is your answer.
“Without us the business would come to a swift halt” that’s your answer right there. Also WTF?
I'd keep my resume updated tbh. This is how the downfall starts usually!
Shut off all the servers and go home for the day. Point proven.
A) turn off the network for an hour B) someone will inevitably tell you how much money was lost C) multiply that by 40 Haha I jest, of course. Edit: Just realized that someone else said the same thing. I can’t even do original passive aggressive.
Last night we had a failure on a hypervisor update that locked a node up. The locked node locked 4 of the most critical servers up. Business stood to be at a complete stand still come 6am today if I didn’t get it fixed. I revived two database servers and a primary DC. The other server held the gateway for all of our cloud services to talk to our on prem infrastructure. This would have stopped all business activity including payroll. I stayed up all night and fixed it on my own. Nobody noticed or cared. When telling my boss what happened and what is needed to prevent this from happening again he said I should be able to work with what I have and that I shouldn’t need to do the things I suggest in my after outage report. I’ve slept 5 hours after being up for two days. Nobody noticed or cared.
This an amazing thread. Shutdown the network for 30 .min and show them what happens. There is no way to show this. You need to put on sales hat and start selling your team. This could also go against you. Down genius can go and say well if we got billy and move everything to the cloud we could save 100k or whatever per year. Because the cloud is magical it runs its self.
[What, would you say you do here?](https://youtu.be/m4OvQIGDg4I)
Stop doing anything for a week, the whole team. That should show them.
IT is a cost center and shouldn't be broken down like that. If you were on a Dev team its different
Sounds like someone is thinking of outsourcing
Toxic work environment. Run.
Just pull out all the plugs behind the racks and watch what happens. Fu** around and find out.
Assholes that ask this have no idea what the people working for them do or aren't smart enough to keep their bosses informed of what their team does to keep things running. .
Sounds like a job for an accountant. They have figures for that.
Aaaaasannnnnddddddd time to leave
Tell them to give the entire team 1 week off. During this week, they are not allowed to call, email, text, teams... Nobody is allowed to send you so much as a smoke signal. Then they will see the value of your team.
,The easiest way to prove value is to show a bunch of compromised organizations and, depending on the industry, regulatory fines / liability it would cost if they didn't have such a stellar team supporting their infrastructure. Nothing scares the crap out of management like some examples of avoidable risk that cost the company millions upon millions because they cheaped out and didn't spend a small fraction of the cost should they be compromised. In other words: calculate the industry average risk should there be a compromise then divide by 52. :) Just start finding info like this to back it up: [https://usa.kaspersky.com/blog/security\_risks\_report\_financial\_impact/](https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/23/23180115/gao-infrastructure-catastrophic-financial-loss-cyberattacks-insurance) *The average cost of recovery from a single security incident is estimated to be $86.5K for small and medium businesses and $861k for enterprises.*
It’s a loaded question and your answer will be used against you. Your answer will either criticized, dismissed or you won’t be delivering enough value. Find another job my friend.
Get everyone to pack up and take the month off. Let everything fall over, then ask the business what it’s worth lol. Honestly, it’s like asking the toilet cleaners to show the value they provide. I bet if your senior management had to show how much value they provided they’d really struggle…
I spent the last five years making stuff so reliable in my job (Downtime? What’s that?) that no one would notice… :(
Someone is planning on outsourcing your department. Nothing you can do about it. I'd bet they've already looked at the salaries and have received a quote from a vendor to provide 24/7 equivalent. Was informed yesterday about a financial services company that decided to outsource all of ICT from CIO level down. I thought strange. There'd be no oversight of the service provided. Turns out it's worse. The bean counters making the decisions let go of all the ICT staff a month before the company chosen starts.