On the flip side, if numerous errors are causing the workers to stay late at the end of the day, even if they don't get paid overtime, you have a huge business-efficiency problem on your hands, albeit a hard one to measure. If you can solve problems like this, says Kennedy, "It's Tylenol--it relieves the pain. Nobody thinks of the cost of Tylenol when they've got a headache." Noting business problems like this and proposing a solution may not pay the company back big time--at least at first--but it will certainly bolster your credibility.
Here's the easy part: Managers should recognize that IT has business value only insofar as it helps business units cut costs or produce additional revenue. Risk avoidance is simply a variation on the "cut costs" theme: Just ask finance how much it would cost to go through and sanitize all the books if an intruder creatively modified a couple of line items. The hard part is recognizing that we can't do it alone. We must partner with other business units to make those cost cuts happen. For example, before talking about labor savings, partner with the business-unit manager whose labor will be saved, and find out if technology will indeed cut head count. Once you get past that, it's easy to be a hero.
If business success were only a matter of installing a certain type of server or software or management application--or any deterministic tool used in business--we'd all be stinking-rich entrepreneurs. Instead, we as IT managers must come to grips with the fact that business success and, ultimately, IT success involve due diligence, risk and judgment.
Getting buy-in is as much art as science. It has to do with relationships and history, so you must build both. Most of all, as one manager told us, "There is no silver bullet. If there were, we could teach a monkey to do it."
Speaking of business credibility, one way to strengthen yours is to understand where IT fits into the corporate jigsaw puzzle from a profit-and-loss standpoint. To do so, you need to understand a couple of managerial accounting concepts. Managerial accounting is the subdiscipline of accounting that helps your business maximize profits, minimize expenses and operate more efficiently. When the decision is made to outsource your IT department, it typically comes from someone playing the MA game, so pay attention.
Responsibility centers: From an MA standpoint, upper management judges departments based on the type of responsibility centers they are, because the type of center indicates what type of fiscal performance is expected. For example, IT is usually considered a cost center, where the manager is fiscally responsible for containing cost. The sales department typically is considered a revenue center, where the manager is responsible for total sales but not necessarily for profitability. A profit center, naturally, is responsible for making sure that revenues outstrip expenses, thus turning a profit; the manager of a consulting practice is, in effect, in charge of a profit center. Finally, an investment center is responsible not only for profitability but for making wise capital investments.
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