by Greg Shields

How has this misalignment happened? How have the goals of today’s businesses and the goals of their infrastructure caretakers deviated so radically, especially considering the relatively short history of Information Technology. How have marketing and sales and accounting managed to maintain a tight focus on the business bottom line while IT finds itself in a different mindset entirely?

It is my argument that IT’s short history is exactly the source of its misalignment. Growing from its historical roots as a purely scientific pursuit, through its years as a strictly consumer-focused hobby, to today’s mission-critical component of business, IT remains a nascent and immature industry that is still struggling to find its place at the boardroom table.

Allow me for a minute to back up my argument using a set of high-level examples. In these, I intend to focus not on their technologies or products, but instead to guide you through some of the practices and processes they use in fulfilling that mission. Consider the following situations that you may be experiencing in your business today.

IT Doesn’t Understand Its Budget

Unlike the aforementioned “sales guys” or “marketing experts” or fellow executives, the average IT professional doesn’t wake up every morning thinking about sales or revenues. Profits and products are concepts that rarely enter their minds. Budgets are abstract concepts that are generally spoken of with disdain: “We need this technology, or this training, or this widget to fix Problem A, but we’re told there’s no money in the budget. Why don’t they understand?”

To the classic IT professional, money and budgets and all the things that make a business successful represent hurdles to solving today’s problems. The average IT professional is bombarded with tens or dozens of advertisements each and every day for products and services that offer to assist them with accomplishing their daily tasks. In many cases, these solutions arrive as slightly-easier or slightly-more-automated solutions for finishing those tasks just a bit faster than the last time they needed to accomplish the action.

When they’re not resolving daily requests, IT professionals find themselves constantly testing out new software, new applications, and new administrative toolsets that automate or otherwise improve the delivery of resources to users. Unlike almost every other business practitioner, IT professionals from neophyte to senior have access to constantly evaluate new practices and processes for accomplishing their jobs. Each of these new practices requires money to incorporate, whether for software purchases, training, or the opportunity costs of maintaining other parts of the environment. The sheer quantity of time spent engaging in these activities can be astonishing.

Complicating this situation even further is the long-standing business tradition of restricting budget specifics to only the hands of the management elite. IT managers and management generally have access to view and argue for budget line items, but that detailed information rarely makes its way to the individual IT professional.

This practice makes a lot of sense for task-oriented teams such as Accounting or Receiving, where projects can be repetitive or unchanging in nature and where wholesale changes to procedures are rare. However, hiding this data ultimately hurts IT organizations, because of their tendency to operate as both strategic as well as tactical practitioners.

Allowing the open sharing of budgetary information with your entire IT staff enables them to better understand the resources they have to work with. It also helps them better understand the impact of their purchase requests. This is particularly important if you’ve felt your IT organization is always petitioning for the newest widget that you can’t quite find the business driver for, because…

About the Author

Greg Shields is an independent author, speaker, and IT consultant, as well as a Partner and Principal Technologist with Concentrated Technology. With 15 years in information technology, Greg has developed extensive experience in systems administration, engineering, and architecture specializing in Microsoft OS, remote application, systems management, and virtualization technologies. He is a Contributing Editor and columnist for TechNet Magazine and Redmond Magazine, and serves as the Series Editor for Realtime Publishers, the world’s leading provider of high-quality content for the IT market. Greg is a highly sought-after and top-ranked speaker for both live and recorded events, and is seen regularly at conferences like TechMentor Events, Microsoft Tech Ed, VMworld, and more. He is a multiple recipient of Microsoft “Most Valuable Professional” award.