ComputerWorld: How IT is rethinking the traditional budgeting process

Seemingly straightforward, the traditional IT budgeting process still manages to put many CIOs and IT controllers on the defensive. Corporate accountants and business unit leaders demand to know what departments are getting in exchange for their technology surcharges, which are often levied as a chargeback or a fee extracted from various operational divisions to fund the IT department.

To inject the new levels of transparency that senior managers now demand, and further assert the business value of IT, more CIOs are becoming proactive.

"Now we are facilitating the dialogue and helping to establish the priorities. This subtle change makes a world of difference and allows my team to get an early heads-up so that we can plan resources accordingly," says Robert Golden, director of strategic business services at Insurance House, a Marietta, Ga.-based brokerage company that works with independent retail insurance agents throughout the Southeast.

Which business unites should fund the latest technology investments, and how? What is a sustainable business model for funding a next-generation converged network design with video, audio, and applications? This article dives into methods for changing normal IT budgeting process into a proactive IT financial management - for example, billing different departments for their IT use, motivating users to use resources more wisely. Reduced demand might even trickle down into fewer network devices, servers, storage, power, cooling, and floor space, reducing IT costs, if you can make the connection between usage and value.

WorseThanFailure: The Cool Cam

Indeed, this is a particularly interesting anecdote that shows that many sins are forgivable if there is enough value to what you do.

"European Air War was doomed. It was four years in development and not even close to being ready to ship… It almost seemed as though the execs were only keeping the project alive for the sadistic pleasure they took in watching the developers squirm. And among the bugs mentioned above, there were mountains more.

Tim knew what he was getting into when he came aboard the project…. With all of the bugs he could get started on, he decided it was necessary to add a new feature instead. He developed a camera system that would focus on anything "cool" happening near the player.…

Getting a double whammy of tough questions ("How overbudget is this project?" and "Why shouldn't we cancel this right now?"), Tim made sure his plane was level and flying evenly and let go of the joystick and hit the cool cam button… Suddenly, the camera zoomed in on an explosion, following a flaming plane barreling toward the earth, then the focus moved slightly to another plane quickly evading the flaming shell. Tim took the controls again when the execs lobbed another tough question about bugs they'd made no progress in fixing. …, he didn't have to answer because everyone was fixated on the screen. ...Tim's "cool cam" saved European Air War.

The lesson is not that debugging isn't important, but that it's often a good idea, when talking about IT budgeting or new projects, to keep your focus on what the project can do and what you can do next with it, rather than point out all the good progress you've been making fixing things. As techies, we tend to think in terms of how to effectively do what we've been tasked with when what really gets rewarded (with continued projects and larger IT budgets) is figuring out what we can do to help the company more effectively do its business and make money.

Network World's Layer 8: Hear no evil, see no evil: business e-mail overtakes the telephone.

E-mail has taken over as the number one business communication tool, according to a survey by Datamonitor/Dimension data, which revealed that while only 80% use fixed-line telephones, 76% use mobiles, and 66% use IM, but fully 100% of those that responded use e-mail.

The research surveyed 390 IT managers and 524 enterprise users across 13 countries in the United States, Asia Pacific and Europe, Middle East and Africa. The results may not come as a surprise to those companies that have a lot of branch office s or telecommuters. Nemertes Research says 83% of companies run virtual workplaces, and such organizations overall are experiencing an average 11% growth in the number of branch offices meaning there's a whole lot of people communicating without ever seeing or possibly hearing their branch office brethren.

Because no one will see or hear employees, e-mail is the preferred method of communication at Ninja Burger.