Financial

Valuable vs. fun: learning to love IT Asset Management

Tweet My attitude is that if you push me towards something that you think is a weakness, then I will turn that perceived weakness into a strength. – Michael Jordan As with so much in life, so it goes with IT: the parts that are fun aren’t always valuable, and the parts that are valuable aren’t [...]

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A rational CapEx purchase and tracking process for IT

Tweet How often does someone in your company (often the CIO, or the CTO, or the head of infrastructure) end up running through the halls, waving a purchase order that “has” to be signed off that very day, or else key systems will allegedly go dark? Maybe you’re in the fortunate situation of being in [...]

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Financial metrics for IT: the holy grail of ROI and how it misses the point: Part 2

Tweet As I promised in my previous post on this, and along the lines of the “intensely practical” goal of this blog, we’ll now take a look at the financial cost analysis for a specific project.  This is only an example, with details changed or obscured, but it is based on a real proposal from [...]

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Financial metrics for IT: the holy grail of ROI, and how it misses the point: Part 1

Tweet Let’s talk some more about one of my favorite topics, project portfolio management (PPM). A lot of literature on PPM tends to focus on evaluating risks and returns. An excellent article on IT governance last week in The Wall Street Journal had the following sage advice: “Create an IT portfolio by evaluating risks and [...]

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Avoiding the Rubber Stamp maintenance renewal syndrome

Tweet As I discussed last time, everything you add to your environment (hardware, software) costs money in recurring fees. Part of the job of the CTO/CIO is to sign dozens of invoices, each and every week, that approve payment for the various elements in your infrastructure that have come up for renewal. And hey, we’re [...]

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Budgeting maintenance and support for IT

Tweet What does IT do, anyway? Well, among other things, IT spends money. In many modern companies, the expenditures made through IT are among the highest in the company, second only to salaries and marketing. What does that mean? It often means that when cost-cutting time comes around (as it tends to do, in cycles, [...]

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