Budget cuts have either already arrived for some of you or are imminent for everyone else. The question is therefore how best to protect and maintain existing IT budgets or at least minimise the effect of spending reductions on IT services.
With that in mind, IT departments need to identify core IT services that ‘keep the lights on’ and are indispensable, mainstream services that support short- and long-term business goals and plans for growth, and strategic services that will definitely be needed in future but can be put on hold for the moment.
This tripartite segmentation should be then accompanied by a transparent and easily-understood explanation of the costs of each service together with details of how those services benefit other departments.
The aim is to demonstrate that due to the pervasiveness of IT and technology throughout housing providers’ operations, reductions in IT budgets will have quantifiable effects on ‘down-stream’ services that rely on IT, such as tenant communications and responsive repairs, and will result in operational inefficiencies and cost increases that outweigh the original budget reductions.
To use a crude analogy, if you and a colleague are being chased by a lion, there’s no need to run faster than the lion as long as you run faster than your colleague.
