What determines IT spending Priorities?

What determines IT spending Priorities?

Just as difficult to read on the ground as at an altitude of 10363m, This article proved I have very little upstanding of economics, but what  did get out of it in my mind proved logical and nothing to ground breaking,

The article breaks down a survey of 1495 business leaders on where they are looking to spend their IT dollars on the different functions of their business.

Not surprisingly for me most businesses expected administration (people) to be the biggest IT expense. The article broke down the data more with small business more like to rank security as a low expense and big business a high, as small business think they are not susceptible to hacking and would prefer to spend on R&D.

One trend I found interesting was that in general business small and large were not prioritizing spending in general on security, because of the poor economic climate at the time of writing, I assume to save money and run bearing the risk. I look at this two ways take the risk and come out on top maybe or continue with high security and protect what is of value to your business until the tough times are over but I guess it depends on business type which path you would take.

In conclusion a tricky read with what I think was not really astounding info, you could work out where spending might be by looking at the business and think logically. This may be the IT department brain in me think not the management brain though.

 Just over Australia now, 7 hours to go, Who’s doing the R&D for Singapore air in flight entertainment?  the plane on this map is far from scale, business opportunity or a business spending elsewhere in tough economic times.

Paper 2 Six Decisions Your IT People Shouldn't Make

"Six IT Decisions Your IT People Shouldn't Make" By Jeanne W. Ross and Peter Weill.

Initially I didn't find this article very thought provoking until I started writing about it, as for nearly all the the six decisions I have seen affects of these being made by the wrong people (IT team or misinformed\not interested people management team or a combination of the two).

1. How much should we spend on IT?
2. Which Business Process should receive our IT Dollars?
3. Which IT capabilities need to be company wide?
4. How good Do our IT services really need to be?
5. What Security and privacy risk well we accept?
6. Whom do we blame if and IT initiative fails?

My first comment covers Decisions 1,3 ,4, and 6. 
If the team I work with was put in charge of spending there would be many services duplicated and under utilised, in the past we had our own exchange server which enabled us to be very flexible with distribution lists and department identity with regards to email address, creation of role based accounts . Since this service has been centralised, sure we can't instantly set up a new account, if something goes wrong with a new Staff members HR processing or someone cant be added to a distribution list with 3 clicks, now it takes an email to the central IT department to sort. This now all takes a bit longer but there is less licensing, hardware and maintenance cost and its one less service a already under pressure IT team has to maintain.

Currently there is decisions being made about upgrades to systems that have a huge amount of features that cam be implemented and can do some very cool things, the problem I see with this is  even with a small business there is a lot of setup involved for a small IT team like the one I work with. I can see that possibly the management team has been misinformed  with high expectations and when the new system is implemented very little of the features discussed with them will be implemented properly and will possibly be under utilised in the wrong areas and not really add any business value. Saying that though, the fault may fall back a little on the managements teams lack interest in IT and role it plays in there business and there dismissive decisions.

Decision 3.
I found this interesting in the fact I have seen first hand a few very intelligent people requesting a Mac (Influenced by Apple crack, the amazing apple marketing machine), when we are primarily a Windows environment. Advising that the applications they use for there business\corporate\research workspace are not available on OSX, or they have being using Windows for the last 15 years how can a change now possibly make them more efficient on a unfamiliar operating system?
The result after a few months once the decision had been over ridden my a management team trying to make a problem go away, that had not taken much insight just trying to keep there staff happy, a request to install Windows in boot camp and a department manager asking for their staff members Mac to be taken off them because they had become so unproductive.


Decision 2.
 I'm not sure where the blame lie's here but I have seen an IT team getting to-many projects thrown at it, starting one getting put on to another coming back to the one before and finishing one of these, this defiantly "leads to a backlog of delayed initiatives and an overwhelmed and demoralised IT department and costly as many tasks before a performed again as a past project is continued after a long break. This would be avoided with a Management team setting clear objectives after being informed correctly in the first place

Decision 5
This amused me as although I have not worked in an environment where levels of security\privacy and been decided, I imagined my work places security implementation could be likened to Fort Knox if we were left in-charge with out involvement from our management team. Which would not fit the business environment as many staff travel and collaborate when various other business and institutions.

This has gone a little off topic and turned more into a rant  than a structured blog post, but all in all I think there needs to be a balance between IT and Management with IT advising management and management taking interest in aligning the business with IT and having the final say. The Article sums this up nicely with good examples that I can relate to.