For years CIOs would look at me as if I had two heads when I asked them, “What would it take to turn your IT department into a profit center?”

They looked at me that way because times were good, profits were flowing and the funds – and staffing – was readily available to test new projects with or without clearly defined objectives and metrics to verify both the validity and ROI of the “pet project of the month.”

Then along comes a financial meltdown and 10.2% unemployment and suddenly not only are pet projects being cut but so are the needed enhancements to improve the viability and survivability of a firm’s IT, telephony and storage infrastructure.

This has forced CIOs to take a step back and answer some tough questions – and provide real numbers and a firm business case – as to how their department, their staff and their projects meet the overall growth and profit goals of their company.

According to Gartner, the IT agenda of firms both small and large will be dominated by virtualization, business intelligence and social media.

Additionally, we have seen and will continue to see, a shift from CapEx to OpEx spending for the next year as companies attempt to stretch their budgets by stretching their hardware while the economy is still working through the malaise. This shift to OpEx is made more viable as “cloud computing” becomes more reliable and vibrant. When computing in the cloud the emphasis is shifted from the hardware on the client side to the connectivtiy and bandwidth, which are both less expensive and able their costs are able to be distributed across all users.

However, literally millions of servers are beyond their scheduled replacement dates, which will increase the failure rate and potential for lost data and productivity of firms nationwide. And that could be the silver bullet in your budget planning arsenal when it comes to requesting increased funding for both CapEx and OpEx for your IT department.

Meantime between failure rates can be calculated and when multiplied by the number of servers, average length of outage and proft per employee per hour you have your business impact the CFO and CEO will want to see to justify spending money on IT.

For help in calculating those numbers or in extending the life of your current equipment, please contact us for a free consultation.