Rating: +1
So for example, if you know that your current server farm won't handle the traffic from next huge marketing promotion, what kind of documentation or presentation do you use to approach the director of marketing.
Eliot,
A lot depends on the charge back model. In a direct charge back model it should not be to difficult, there is a cost associated with a particular cost centers technological needs. You have a LOB request; you go out and get quotes and present it back to the LOB unit. The efficiency of the delivery becomes more important and what needs to be explained. You can spend X or Y, and explain the differences and trade-offs and let them decide. LOB IT support rarely allows for the “bigger picture” to be considered (i.e. data center power consumption). Also, you do have to be exact especially when a LOB head is going to compare notes with other LOB's heads in the same company. Marketing will question why they have to spend another 100K to support a new LOB application for server hardware when they have other servers and storage that are not fully utilized, but their peer in another division added two new business applications without any additional server hardware. You know that for support purposes you still need and want dedicated hardware, that's what has to be explained and sold internally. In a shared services model, where much of the IT spend is depreciated across all LOB units there is much less contention, since you can better plan/budget for growth without any one LOB unit feeling a big pinch. Then you are truly delivering IT “services” as a service, and you are investing in virtualization, blades, thin provisioning, etc. to build a shared infrastructure to support the “business” and not LOB silos. However, in either scenario I have always found it useful to present “choices” and explain “differences” and pros and cons and allow the people who are paying for the service to pick – and remember that the more you can explain in “every day speak” vs. technical discussions will add to your credibility, you will be listened to as opposed to your audience tuning you out. Then you will be sought for further counsel. From your perspective each “choice” you put into your proposal will plug in and fit into your overall architecture (that’s what we do as good architects) – so at the end of the day, always have multiple choices, know which will do the job, do it better and do it best – and know the differences and why the buyer should care about the deltas or not. Never over complicate and always simplify.
Good Luck,
Peter
June 2009