Budgeting for I.T. (part 1)

For many organizations, September and October are the time to plan budgets for the upcoming year. If you are engaged in the budget process and your organization does not employ a full time Information Technology administrator with extensive business and technical credentials, you need outside assistance (to put it bluntly).

Planning for I.T. involves much more than estimating how many new PCs to purchase or when to install upgrades to the accounting system. If those questions come up early in the process, it's likely that you are still thinking of I.T. as a cost center, and are focusing on how to reduce expenditures. This is the wrong approach--even if there's a serious preexisting cost problem.

Nowadays, I.T. is a "productivity center" for your organization. A productivity center has some elements of a cost and a profit center. (For nonprofits, the only way to think of I.T. is in terms of productivity. I hope you're doing so.) And management can "drive" productivity in ways that it cannot influence cost or profit.

How do you begin to manage your I.T. resources as a productivity center? First, conduct a Network Assessment. An assessment should uncover productivity leaks, expose security issues, understand your data management practices and take a look at assets and resources.

In every office, there are productivity leaks. Very often, the reward for fixing productivity leaks is great compared to the cost of ignoring them.

Another important deliverable is to uncover data safety and expose network security problems and prioritize their remediation. These are distinct practices, but related to each other.

More on budgeting for Information Technology in the next post.