Your Next IT Budget: 6 Ways to Support Business Growth
Make sure your IT budget priorities match up with the current business focus on growth. Here, Forrester Research shares six tips for changing the infrastructure and operations portion of your IT budget to support business expansion.
Tue, July 20, 2010
CIO — After a year of deep recession affecting IT budgets, businesses are finally returning to a growth agenda. And infrastructure and operations is no exception: in the coming year, Forrester expects a noticeable bump in IT spend. So what does this mean for the infrastructure professional? It's time to reprioritize initiatives to align with the business' focus on growth. To do so, look at where your dollars are coming from, tap into funds set aside for innovation and growth, and deliver on three critical I&O initiatives.
Infrastructure and operations has always been one of the largest IT functions, so it's no surprise that it can consume up to 50% of the overall IT budget. When asked about spending plans, IT decision-makers told us the I&O budget breaks down into three nearly equal sized buckets. 16% is dedicated to staff, 19% to servers, storage and desktop assets, and 14% maintains the local-area and wide-area networks.
But 2010 will not be business as usual. When asked to categorize the IT spend breakdown, we found that only half of the funds are going to ongoing operations and maintenance. "Keeping the lights on" is taking a backseat while new IT initiatives and expansions move forward, utilizing the other half of IT spend.
When focusing in on just the I&O budget, it breaks down into two nearly equal categories of infrastructure spend. Half is spent on the data center, including servers, storage, and networking, while the other half goes to desktop and device infrastructure.
You might be thinking this sounds like business as usual, so what's the problem? The traditional breakdown of spending half the budget inside the datacenter and the other half on user infrastructure contradicts the mandate to focus on new initiatives and supporting business expansion. If you fall into the 50/50 category, then it's time to break the cycle and focus on three key efforts. Each of these efforts have components that meet the "new IT initiative" and "support business expansion" objectives the CIO and CEO demand.
Start By Transforming Your Desktop
• Deploy Windows 7 as a new IT initiative. Most companies skipped Windows Vista and now have an opportunity to capitalize on the PC and workstation budgets to phase in Windows 7. You might be tempted to downgrade to Windows XP to avoid app compatibility hassles, but new features in Windows 7 will help unlock productivity benefits, security and management enhancements, and green IT cost efficiencies.
• Implement client virtualization to support business expansion. New desktop and application virtualization technologies support business expansion through bring-your-own-computer programs that can attract and retain new talent, as well as hosted virtual desktop infrastructure to connect third-party users. But transforming the desktop architecture isn't easy—it's time to segment your user population by looking at the mobility and productivity needs that drive the architecture.
