Back in my early IT days I made a shift from a small company to a large one and I was quickly surprised by the amount of waste in IT at the large org. The IT staff was enormous and yet consistent asks for tools to automate and streamline were rebuffed. There were well known folks in the business who did nothing all day, but no one was willing to take the time to document things so they could be removed. Meanwhile there were tons of manual processes we just threw bodies at because we had the bodies to throw around. This is the definition of the old phrase “penny-wise, pound foolish.” The business was unwilling to spend small amounts of money with high ROI because they were spending way too much money on staff with a low ROI. It eventually caught up to them after a large enterprise system implementation. The money got tight and the business looked at what was core to their operations and laid of 30% of their IT workforce.
The problems are the same with smaller companies. My experience in IT is that the work makes it easy to stay in autopilot mode. There will always be urgent and emergent things that demand your attention. If you give it some time, your day will be planned for you. It’s much harder to be proactive, to step outside the urgent and identify areas for improvement. And the frustrating thing is, as tech geek, to then have to speak to non-techs who make the financial decisions about why we should spend some money on some cool stuff that will make our lives easier.
What I’ve learned is that time spent translating tech into business-speak is well worth it. I have to fight my thinking that “this solution is obviously the best” and break it down in to pounds and pennies.
Here’s an example that hits close to home: peripherals. It’s the wild-west of small biz IT. Everything is plug and play and end-users are used to hitting up their local gadget joint for whatever cool tech is available to trick out their rig. The problem is that the quality and security varies widely. A wireless keyboard for home use may transmit keystrokes unencrypted. Those ridiculously cheap cameras and headphones on Amazon may actually store data locally or worse yet, phone home to the parent company to sell your data to the highest bidder. From an IT standpoint it’s a no-brainer to setup a custom catalog where employees can order vetted and approved peripherals. But the finance guy is going to crap a brick when you show a price tag of $15/employee/month to do it.
That’s where the translation has to happen. It takes the hard work of figuring out how much time and money is being currently wasted on our existing process, then turning that into pennies and pounds to show the ROI makes sense. Despite their reputation otherwise, the finance guys are pretty reasonable when you show your work.