This session was conducted in an audience-sourced, unconference style, basically open discussions on making useful enterprise IT investments among the participants.

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Making $ and ₵ of IT
‐ An Uconference
28 Aug 2015
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Unconference
• “Crowd‐sourced”
• Participant‐driven meeting
• Participants to decide on the agenda
• Open discussion
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Outline
1:00 Intro
1:10 Decide topics to discuss
1:15 Unconference **see our pledge
1:40 Wrap‐up, summarise, document for sharing
1:45 Sharing
1:50 Next session …
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Our Pledge aka ground rules
• We listen actively, respect others ‐ are present
• We share own experiences & stories – concise, time is short
• We respectfully challenge each other ‐ ask questions, focus on
ideas
• We participate actively, to fullest of our ability – collective
growth depends everyone’s voice
• We let others share, we let at least 2 others share before we
speak again
• Our goal is to gain deeper understanding of the subject
together
• We record our discussion to benefit the wider community
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www.edchange.org/multicultural/activities/groundrules.html
www.education.com/reference/article/nine‐rules‐good‐discussion

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IT Cost/TCO/Investment/ROI
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IT Budgeting/Portfolio
• Building the alignment to business
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Beyond $ and ₵ …
• Running IT as a business
• Cost vs value focus
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or

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We discussed …
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Reflections
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Our Reflections …
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• Companies should looking into
 Improving
 Innovating
 Integrating
• Improving current process to provide competitive
advantage and facilitate business needs and long term
strategic goals that need to achieved
• IT should be closely in line with business requirements
and innovate current way of doing and integrate all the
process in solid foundation of business

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Our Reflections …
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• IT as a cost centre vs IT as a business
 Not so much of either categorization but more how IT can understand the
business and partner them to value add
• In terms of justifying the $ and ₵, the difficulty is
usually in infrastructure projects where it is difficult
to explain and justify in less technical terms
• Strategic projects tend to be “easiest” with strong
business support

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Our Reflections …
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• How to justify investment
• IT portfolio
• Monitoring of the IT investment
• IT as a business vs cost centre
• How to convince management for an investment
 Productivity/revenue loss
 Benchmark

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Our Reflections …
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• IT as a cost & business
• Investment of equipment – for facilitating of business
• How to convey the need for investment to the
management

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Our Reflections …
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• IT cost centre vs business
 There is an another dimension to be considered, that is, IT as a shared
services
 Organisations are moving towards IT as a strategic partner but they face
some struggle as businesses still consider IT as a cost centre
• Investment & budgeting
 IT is expected to do innovation more than anything for now
 Most of the budget goes to strategic capital investment

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Our Reflections …
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• IT investment / cost
 Should consider tangible benefit
 Return generated
 Cost reduced
 Cost avoided
 Also consider intangible benefit
 Ease of use / engagement
 Efficiency of desired objective
• IT budget
 Generally the classification of assets as
 Infrastructure
 Transaction
 Information
 Strategic
are universal
• Running IT as business
 Still in the progression
 Have pros/cons

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Our Reflections …
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• IT is slowly evolving from cost centre to business
centre
• The challenge is how to create value to the “internal
customer”
• Intangible benefits play an important part in the
decision of external customers where they emphasise
more on customer experience than the investment
that the company has to put in

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Our Reflections …
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• Types of IT costs
 To reflect if the current spending in each category align with the
organisation’s strategy
 To use the categories as reality check – target percentages vs actual spent
=> gap analysis
• Justification of IT investment
 Cost / capital savings
 Cost / capital avoided
 Revenue enhancements

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Our Reflections …
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• Portfolio
 Time dimension
 Industry that we are in
 Life stage of the company
 Should not focus on the percentage (arbitrary)
• IT as a business
 Shadow IT
 Stagnation of service

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Our Reflections …
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• Is running IT as a business the right model for an
organisation?
• Does it have more benefits than downsides?
• It may be a bad idea, for reasons such as:
 Unproductive employees due to time spent in getting IT for help
 Increased product cost due to internal changes
 Unhappy employees & organisation

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Thank you 
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Fel & Tzann
We gratefully acknowledge the usage of various images from the many internet sources, in the spirit of sharing & learning